After
Mount Kimbie released
Love What Survives in 2017, both members of the British duo embarked on different paths. Dom Maker relocated to Los Angeles and worked with longtime close friend and collaborator
James Blake on several high-profile projects, including sessions with
Jay-Z,
Travis Scott, and
SZA. Meanwhile,
Kai Campos compiled the duo's techno-heavy 2018
DJ-Kicks mix and toured with
Actress, additionally performing DJ sets at numerous festivals and clubs such as Fabric.
MK 3.5: Die Cuts | City Planning is essentially
Mount Kimbie's
Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, a double solo album split between each member, showcasing their separate approaches and ideas.
Maker's half is a left-field pop record featuring a wide variety of singers, rappers, and instrumentalists. Incorporating playing by musicians like
Sampha, Duval Timothy, and
Blake, the tracks include fractured, bittersweet laments as well as angsty rap expressions. On the grim "in your eyes,"
slowthai sounds more pained and pissed-off than usual, while
Danny Brown's verses switch between conscious and flippant statements from line to line.
Wiki's "if and when" and
slowthai's other feature, "kissing," are more vulnerable reflections about relationships and personal struggles. While tracks featuring
Kučka and
Choker are moody but light pop songs, and
Blake's "somehow she's still here" is an atmospheric piano ballad, most of the other cuts intriguingly blur the lines between lo-fi hip-hop and slow-burning neo-soul. One of the standouts, "say that" (featuring
Nomi), flips from melted boom-bap to gorgeous downtempo lounge before slowing to a crawl for its ending.
KeiyaA and
Liv.e, two experimental R&B artists who released remarkable debut full-lengths in 2020, respectively close out Die Cuts with "tender hearts meet the sky" and "a deities encore," both of which exemplify that troubled yet hopeful mood of the record.
Campos' disc, City Planning, is a set of abstract instrumentals, drifting between hissy,
Actress-style techno and spiraling,
Drexciyan electro. The more uptempo tracks tend to consist of swift, steady beats and swirling, levitating effects, with "Transit Map (Flattened)" centering around a murky, ominous piano sequence. The titles evoke detailed sets of grids and coordinates, but the music is actually much more spontaneous-sounding and lighter in tone than the clinical industrial tracks one might expect. Apart from "Zone 1 (24 Hours)," the selections are generally brief and concise, and the shortest ones sometimes feel like sketches that could've been developed further. Still, the techno side of
Mount Kimbie is just as creative as the pop/R&B/hip-hop side, and both halves of
MK 3.5 contain several gems. ~ Paul Simpson