Music

Marcus Mumford is starting a hip-hop project

by Mark Teo

Much of the talk about Mumford and Sons forthcoming album, Wilder Mind, has been the band’s change in sound. Marcus Mumford and co., after all, had built their sound around being equal parts rustic and authentic: Their hit LP, Babel, was largely acoustic, and carried their banjo-driven kitchen-band aesthetic all the way to the world’s biggest stages. Accordingly, it was a surprise to hear that on Wilder Mind, the band plugged in and went electric. Even more surprising? They used synthesizers.

In interviews, the band’s suggested that they wanted to try new things on Wilder Mind. But Marcus is taking that to even higher extremes: Yes, we knew that he’d be hanging up his well-worn vest, ditching the civil war garb in the process. But we never thought that he’d be shopping at Karmaloop and collaborating with Kanye West’s producer on a hip-hop project.

No, we’re not joking. Although this is certainly the type of story we’d attempt to develop for April Fool’s Day.

He’s recruited producer 88 Keys to work on the project, whose production credits span from Black Star, to the Pharcyde, to Jay Z and Kanye West on their Watch the Throne album. 88 Keys, Marcus told NME, is training him onto chop up beats. Even more surprising: The singer says he grew up listening to backpack hip-hop before he got into, like, civil war re-enactments.

“That’s really fun for me,” Marcus, who no longer resembles a turn-of-the-century hooch bootlegger, continued. “I don’t really care about how we’re seen right now, because I think the story of this band will be a long one. People are always going to say stuff in the moment, but I hope that the arc of the band will be interesting.”

No news on when we can expect to hear the project—or if a hip-hop influence will ever bleed into Mumford and Sons. Maybe one day they’ll write a track as good as the 88 Keys-produced “No Church in the Wild.”