King Ropes

Super Natural, King Ropes’ fifth album, is full of open spaces and jagged edges. Guitars scrape and whine. Amps rumble. Rickety pianos rattle in and out of tune. Like Montana, the band’s home, nothing is too refined. At the center of it all is singer and frontman Dave Hollier, a gifted songwriter at the top of his game, surveying a land haunted by doomed relationships and hypocrite ideologues in his odd, quivering voice. The songs convey a world that is remarkably gorgeous but also harsh and unforgiving, dark and foreboding.

Super Natural is at once King Ropes’ most ambitious and intimate work, expanding the parameters of the band’s desert rock and ragged americana sound. It is buoyed by a directness that brings out Hollier’s most stirring songwriting to date. Hollier has a gift for writing about tragedy and pain with wry humor and conversational bluntness. Long-simmering family trauma, visions of animal reincarnation, mysterious respiratory ailments—all are worthy songwriting prompts as the record vacillates from the pounding rhythms of “Hello Sun” and thick, stoner-rock roar of “Drunk Donny” to the tenderness of “Sure,” a sorrowful, synth-driven ode to regret, and the quietly stunning, disarmingly plainspoken “Breathing”