Prove The Mountains Move

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.

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—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.”

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.”