For just over a decade, EXEK has very quietly become one of the most hypnotic bands on the planet, mutating and growing from record to record, gradually opening themselves up without ever losing that strange, inscrutable, altogether essential quality that’s made them so great—so EXEK-y.
On 27 February, the Melbourne post-punk outfit—vocalist and chief architect Albert Wolski, guitarist Jai Morris-Smith, drummer Chris Stephenson, synth specialist Andrew Brocchi, trumpet-brandishing vocalist Valya YL Hooi, and bassist Ben Hepworth—will release Prove The Mountains Move, their seventh album and first for DFA. It is, as Wolski says, “a bit more 'epic’” than anything he’s recorded to date, a lush and unabashedly melodic set of surrealist pop that luxuriates in contradiction. “This record is experimental in its craft,” Wolski says, “but it may not necessarily sound experimental.”
There’s good reason for that. Work began on a cold afternoon in June of 2023, as Wolski and Stephenson came together at Pelican Refill Studios in Melbourne to track drums—the first thing they always do. From there, Wolski went home on his own and began sifting through the beats and breaks they’d captured, letting the drum sounds guide him towards melodies and basslines, looping and layering and laying foundation for what would become Prove The Mountains Move. “I feel comfortable tinkering away alone like a mad scientist,” he says. “I also enjoyed pressing record with no clear intention. More often than not, that would steer me towards an interesting direction that my conscious mind probably wouldn't have sought out.”
And yet, somehow Wolski arrived at his most direct work since he launched the project, newly inspired by the clarity and concision of mainstream pop, the strong and undeniable pull of a simple vocal melody. After Melbourne’s famously stringent COVID lockdowns ended, he found himself wanting to stay out. “Working on new music took a distant backseat to raging with friends,” he says. “And those parties were filled with big bangers as the soundtrack—stuff I didn’t really listen to on my own, stuff I hadn't really encountered since my adolescence. But in the early hours of Sunday morning, ‘Alive’ by Pearl Jam sounds like you’re talking to God. And so does “All I Wanna Do”by Sheryl Crow, and so does “Feel” by Robbie Williams. Krautrock and dub were still in my DNA, but the music that I started to make was perhaps a little more lighthearted, and perhaps a bit more emotional.”
Which isn’t to say you should expect to hear traces of Eddie Vedder in Wolski’s vocal delivery here, but the stakes feel similar in their own way—this is what it sounds like when EXEK are really going for it. Take, for instance, the levitating synths of opener “Sidestepping” or the mountainous guitars of “Arriverderci Back Pain,” the piano bench pyrotechnics of “Don’t Answer (When They Call)” or the Bowie-like melancholy of “You Have Been Blessed.” The arrangements feel more open, the sonics more focused, the colors more brightly rendered. It’s not hard to believe him when Wolski says he spent time earnestly A-B’ing his mixes of Prove The Mountains Move against some of the most important albums ever recorded, Abbey Road among them.
But everything is relative. And lyrically, Wolski remains oblique. ”Each song is a vignette into an abstract milieu, whether it’s an experimental chiropractic business at an airport, or scantily clad creatures made from dust at a food court. No matter how wacky, there's themes and motifs throughout the record, both lyrical and musical, that mirror up and reflect each other throughout different songs.” That dissonance—between the direct and indirect, smooth and textured, shadowed and incandescent, zany and deadpan—is the animating force at the heart of these songs, his best yet.
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