Mocomono feels less like a one‑off collaboration and more like the latest chapter in a long, ongoing conversation. For nearly twenty years, Hifiklub, the ever‑curious outfit from Toulon, has built its identity around working with others, stacking up more than two hundred collaborations since their 2007 debut. Among all those encounters, the bond with Alain Johannes has proved the most vital and enduring - a thread running quietly through their discography, deepening with each project. Founding member of Eleven and a trusted ally to Queens of the Stone Age, Them Crooked Vultures, Mark Lanegan and PJ Harvey, Johannes brings with him a very specific gravity: a songwriter’s ear for melody and space, a producer’s feel for grain and depth, and a guitarist’s instinct for tone as narrative.
Where previous joint outings often leaned into Hifiklub’s angular rock energies, Mocomonotilts the lens toward something more diffuse and enveloping. Described by the band as their most ambient‑leaning album to date, it treats songs less as fixed structures and more as weather systems, drifting in slow formation. Guitars smear into drones, riffs appear as distant mirages, rhythm sections move like shifting undercurrents rather than upfront engines. Johannes’ fingerprints are everywhere: in the smoky melodic phrases that surface from the haze, in the patient layering of textures, in the way distortion is used not for blunt impact but as a soft halo around the sound. The record feels attuned to the quieter, more introspective side of his solo work, yet filtered through Hifiklub’s restless studio logic.
That restlessness remains crucial. Hifiklub approach collaboration as a lab, constantly adjusting their own role: sometimes acting as band, sometimes as host, sometimes as provocation. On Mocomono, they pull back just enough to let Johannes’ sensibility breathe, but never disappear into backing‑band anonymity. You can hear the dialogue in the details - a bass figure that pushes against an ambient wash, a drum accent that snaps a vaporous section into focus, a shard of noise or synth that suddenly reframes Johannes’ guitar line. The result is music that feels simultaneously loose and deliberate, like a series of late‑night improvisations later sifted and sculpted into a coherent, slow‑unfolding narrative.
As their 25th album, Mocomono also reads as a self‑portrait of Hifiklub at this point in their life cycle. Few bands reach such a milestone by constantly reconfiguring themselves around different guests; fewer still manage to sound this unforced. By leaning into an ambient aesthetic, they mark out a new corner of their map without abandoning their core: curiosity, openness, and a taste for long‑game relationships rather than flash‑in‑the‑pan features. In Alain Johannes, they’ve found a collaborator whose own history of band‑as‑family and studio‑as‑home dovetails perfectly with that ethos. The album stands as a quietly luminous testament to what can happen when a collaboration is allowed not just to happen, but to grow old, deepen and find its most subtle, atmospheric form.
