The band previously released title track “Tell Me (Doko Mien)” featuring disco beats colliding with polyrhythm and pizzicato guitar. Stereogum called it “an absurdly infectious percussive party track seemingly inspired by the same influences that fueled Talking Heads and LCD Soundsystem,” and Afropunk said it “sounds like the lost child of some early-’80s, New York session produced by Lisa Lisa’s Cult Jam, or by Gloria Estefan’s old Miami crew.” The group also recently shared the sultry “Guess We Found a Way,” a refreshing change of pace from the more uptempo cuts previously released from Doko Mien, which Stereogum described as “a deep, dreamy groove of a slow jam”—a further indication of the many moods and influences at play across the album’s 11 tracks.

“Music is a universal language, but spoken language can help you think about what makes you emotional, what makes you feel certain feelings, what you want to see in the world,” says frontwoman Eno Williams. When she uses both English and Ibibio—the Nigerian language from which her band’s name is derived—on Doko Mien, the group somehow produces a world of both entrancing specificity and comforting universality, a language entirely of their own. In a glowing piece in the New York Times, the songs on the band’s 2017 second album, Uyai, were praised for following “in the tradition of much African music, [making] themselves the conscience of a community.” By pulsing the mystic shapes of Williams’ lines through further inventive, glittering collages of genre on Doko Mien, Ibibio Sound Machine crack apart the horizon separating cultures, between nature and technology, between joy and pain, between tradition and future.
Long lauded for their jubilant, explosive live shows (Entertainment Weekly best described them, saying, “If the United Nations’ General Assembly convened at Studio 54, Ibibio Sound Machine would easily be that night’s headlining act”), the group fully capture that energy and communication on the new album.

foto Ibibio Sound Machine © Dan Wilton