People often confuse complex music with good music, assuming that the two concepts are intrinsically intertwined. In reality there’s a stark difference; some of the very best music is simplistic, and sometimes intricate musicality can mean very little beneath its overt complication. Dominic Maker and Kai Campos – collectively known as Mount Kimbie – realised this a decade or so ago, and have been picking up the puzzle pieces ever since. Their new fourth album, The Sunset Violent released earlier this month, might just be the complete jigsaw.

I’m sat with Maker and Campos in their Shoreditch headquarters at the beginning of April, days before the unveiling of their latest record. It’s been an active start to 2024 for them, especially Maker who in March moved back to the UK to focus on Kimbie-related endeavours after eight years in the States, with this new project an early climatic point in the annum. “It’s getting there,” Campos answers when I query if the summer is lining up to be a busy one. “We haven’t been out playing for so long, it used to be easy to fill up the calendar if we wanted to. With putting out the new record, we’ve been trying to tell people it’s good [laughs], but that’s not really how festival booking works.”

There’s an inherent Englishness to the pair; a polite, thoughtful and at times pessimistic manner. They were both raised on the south coast – Campos in Cornwall, Maker in Chichester – and met at Southbank University, striking up a social and creative relationship whilst collaborating on a film that Maker was working on. A musical connection soon developed and they trailed a route into the industry, somewhat unassumingly. “We got picked up at a time when we didn’t have a product that we were wary of what the fuck it was,” Maker says. “It was very random how it happened. We literally sent a few songs to a guy and the guy said they were great and we put them out.”

It’s the kind of happy-go-lucky origin story that diminishes ever-more-so in likelihood amidst the quickly evolving modern climate, a musical meet-cute that has resulted in one of defining British acts of their generation. “It feels like a different world [now],” Maker adds. “And it is. [We’re] coming up to 15 years of doing music as a job, so a lot has changed. We were in that beginning part of not knowing what the hell we were doing and it guided us, in a way, on the path that we’ve come through to arrive at where we are now.”

Mount Kimbie’s 2010-released critically-acclaimed debut album Crooks & Lovers, which followed a set of breakout EPs, seated the duo amongst the most exciting electronic acts in the country. Its post-dubstep infrastructure and experimental tendencies felt perplexing, unique and utterly vital at the time, and has proved highly inspirational to UK electronic music’s progression in the decade-and-a-third since. Following their debut’s success, the pair signed to Warp Records and in 2013 released Cold Spring Fault Less Youth, a sprawling, ambitious, and imperfect sophomore. “I think stylistically it’s gone from: the first record that we made was a… thing,” Campos begins, almost bewildered when he decides on the final word of his sentence. “The second was an attempt to make things more complex and dense, and it instantly felt like a wrong turn, and since then it’s been about trying to make the music come across as simply and direct as possible.”

Four years down the line in 2017 the duo took a sharp stylistic turn with Love What Survives, a matured and emotionally-developed album in comparison to its two predecessors, a foray into more natural instrumentation and linear structure. Now – after seven years of solo ventures, unofficial sided projects and a whole lot of sonic refinement – they deliver perhaps their best work with The Sunset Violent. “[Love What Survives] was an attempt to strip back the process somewhat and find what the actual core ideas were,” Campos pinpoints. “[The Sunset Violent] is a way more accomplished version of that. I don’t know where that ends and if there’s anything left (I joke that the next album will just be a single bass drum crochet on repeat for 40 or so minutes), or maybe the idea of complexity becomes interesting [again]. Right now it seems unattractive to us. But that doesn’t mean there’s not loads of thinking that goes into it, and nuance in making it.”

Mount Kimbie’s fourth album sees them acquire an additional two members, previous live show contributors Andrea Balency-Béarn and Marc Pell, merging their aesthetic into that of a band archetype, a visual identity mirrored sonically. The Sunset Violent is their most accessible, concise and personal work; driven-by murky guitar passages and fore-frontal vocals from Maker and Balency-Béarn, the song structures never stray too far from convention, stylistically inhabiting post-rock, shoe-gaze and dream-pop-tinged terrains. “It was the natural arch of our interest,” Maker offers on their further explorations into guitar-driven sonics. “At the route of both of our interest in music is a rather big appreciation for pop music, whatever that might be, and of band music and songs, as opposed to pieces of music, whether for the club or more avant-garde. And that interest has always been there but I don’t think we’ve known how to explore it until now. We needed confidence to song-write in a naked way; having vocals at the front, having instrumentals that are raw and not having lots of trickery in the production.”

When working together on previous records, the pair would uptake a wholly hands-on approach, often sharing the production and recording duties. On this album though, their roles were more disparate; Maker – being halfway across the world during the album’s creation – took on the lyrical and vocal responsibilities, listening to Campos’ recorded guitar demos on repeat as a writing process, an instinctual and highly effective method. “I just got pumped up hearing the guitar,” he says. “From that starting point not much thought goes into it, you’re just turning on the vacuum cleaner and going until you pick stuff up basically. I was always excited hearing those loops every time I’d return to them to add lyrics and vocals. I’d have these demos, I was out in the desert, playing on my phone over and over again. [The creation of the album] always had this feeling of momentum and energy, and never really hit walls. There was always some kind of catalyst that would stop it from becoming stagnant or slow.”

Alongside the fruitful additions of Balency-Béarn and Pell, there’s a few sublime contributions from Peckham behemoth Archy Marshall – or King Krule to most – on the album. Marshall, alongside his contemporary UK electronic music trailblazer James Blake, are Mount Kimbie’s most regular collaborators. “When we started playing gigs James was part of the group with us,” Campos remembers. “I think if we’d met Archy six months previous to when we did, we might have snared him as well, but he just had so much of his own shit to be getting on with. In terms of [when we’re] making a record, there’s always a period when they’ll both be hearing what we’re doing to get their opinion or their energy in the room. There’s never an expectation that they’ll feature on any of the music, we just hang out and listen to stuff and share the room. It’s a bit cheesy but it’s an extended band situation, there’s people that we’ve worked with for ages that are interested in what we’re doing. We’ve had experiences of getting in the room with people in more traditional collaborative ways, which is a different role. But it has never clicked as well as with [Blake and Marshall].”

Despite the sentiment-inducing sonic palette of their new record, Maker and Campos tend not to wallow in nostalgia and reflection. Rather than dwelling on their successes, mistakes and tribulations, Mount Kimbie’s gaze is always forward facing, fixed onto whatever is next, even if they don’t fully know what that is yet. “It’s a nice time playing [old] music in an exclusively live setting because of what it means to other people really,” Campos muses. “But for us it’s like reading something that you wrote in a diary 15 years ago. It’s interesting to see or hear it but in so many ways, as you get more experienced, you tend to get better at stuff. As a culture, there’s a deep rooted fascination with young people and people’s first album, and I get it – there’s a period when artist’s make their first work that’s really engaging and fascinating. But from the other side of it, it’s rarely their best work. The struggle is keeping the same vibrancy. Even if it’s technically better, it doesn’t have the same zip or vitality to it. I think you lose that when you try to do the same thing over again and please the people that liked you at the beginning. If we tried to make another record like Crooks & Lovers, it’d sound flat and we wouldn’t know how to do it with any soul.”

It’s clear that Mount Kimbie won’t be embarking on any ‘anniversary’ or ‘best of’ tours anytime soon then. Instead they will continue to progress, challenge themselves and evolve. “Our goal is never to reinvent ourselves,” Maker concludes. “If you boil it down to someone who’s not really involved in this type of music, most of [our music] probably sounds quite similar and hasn’t really changed that much.” Listening back to the glitchy dub-revivalism of Crooks & Lovers, and comparing it to the fuzzy, subtle ethereality of The Sunset Violent, I couldn’t disagree more.