EXEK - 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.

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.”