Black Mountain

Black Mountain fuses influences from blues, psychedelia, acid rock, Led Zeppelin, and the Velvet Underground into a style that merges the Warlocks’ darkness and grit with the trippiness of Brian Jonestown Massacre, all threaded by a persistent folky undertow. Leader Stephen McBean had previously fronted the semi-acoustic cowpunk outfit Jerk with a Bomb; after two albums with that project, he reconfigured the Vancouver-area group into Black Mountain. The band’s first release, the 12" Druganaut, appeared on Jagjaguwar in October 2004, followed the next January by the self-titled full-length. McBean was joined on the album by Matthew Camirand, Jeremy Schmidt, Joshua Wells, and Amber Webber, who were credited collectively to reflect the group’s communal approach. Black Mountain operated alongside and sometimes overlapped with McBean’s other project, the lo-fi classic rockers Pink Mountaintops. The debut drew strong critical praise and led to an arena tour supporting Coldplay.

January 2008 brought the second album, In the Future, which ventured into proggy and druggy realms on the 17-minute track “Bright Lights.” Wilderness Heart, the third album, surfaced in 2010 and earned Black Mountain the Polaris Prize, one of Canada’s top music honors. In 2012 the band supplied the soundtrack to Year Zero, a documentary about surfing placed in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic setting. A tenth-anniversary expanded reissue of the self-titled debut arrived in 2015. The following year saw the release of the fourth album, IV, produced by Randall Dunn, whose credits include work with Sunn O))). Arjan Miranda replaced Matthew Camirand on bass for the sessions. An extensive international tour followed. Destroyer, the fifth album, appeared in 2019 and featured the single “Future Shade.”