[Hotflush Recordings]

Nearly a year has passed since Crooks & Lovers dropped. Where does the time go? High up on sleepy Mount Kimbie, it appears very little has changed. Carbonated, the latest bleary-eyed missive from the duo of Kai Campos and Dominic Maker, features the group’s first entirely new productions since Crooks, and every undersampled guitar strum, disembodied helium vocal, and cutely shaky drum pattern still sounds perfectly out of place. The new tracks, “Flux” and “Baves Chords,” can confidently go toe-to-toe with any album cut, admittedly without besting any of them. When you explore an extremely specific aesthetic as consistently as Mount Kimbie does, though, you’re not really seeking out highlights so much as further iterations. The former filters their inimitable sound through a curiously tense quasi-house beat, and the latter hits us with a damn pretty chord progression at a half-tempo throb. If you were hungry for new Mount Kimbie tracks your appetite will be sated, though admittedly you’d probably like nine or ten more bites.

Producers seem to take great pleasure in remixing Mount Kimbie: already shattered, their sound lends itself particularly well to being glued together however one sees fit. And Peter Van Hoesen has certainly sculpted something pretty unrecognizable out of “Carbonated.” The guy responsible for some of the best bass lines in techno melts down the track’s digitized sensitivity and coaxes us to dance through the steam. It is, in a word, heavy — dare I say heeeeaaaavy — even for Van Hoesen, though his keen shifting of the beat keeps the mood euphoric. Klaus, who takes on “Adriatic,” gives us a pretty good idea of what Ben Frost covering these guys would sound like, and it’s a damn awesome prospect: Mount Kimbie’s tentative acoustic guitars now sound like distant bomb blasts and pipe clangs, and their lighthearted ambience has been replaced with palpable dread. Airhead’s version of “Carbonated,” however, isn’t set on transforming the track so much as straightening it out. It’s not a bad look — dubstep DJs will surely appreciate having a mixable version of the track — but it’s maybe a slightly too-tidy one for these guys. As a whole, Carbonated will likely keep Mount Kimbie fresh in your mind and, through one remix or another, a mainstay on your decks. Hopefully we won’t have to wait a year for more.