u/matt_geary_music

Essential listening. Don't sleep on this.

"With Mountain States, New Mexico-based banjoist and composer Johnny Bell makes a decisive, long-considered turn inward, toward the instrument that has shaped more than two decades of his musical life, and toward a vision of what the banjo can become when freed from its most rigid expectations. Released as a collaboration between Centripetal Force (USA) and Ramble Records (Australia), Mountain States is Bell’s first fully composed solo banjo record, and it lands less like a genre exercise than a quiet manifesto. The album is being issued in a 200 copy vinyl pressing, as well as digitally. Preorders will go live March 6, with the album releasing on May 8.

Bell has long worked in multi-instrumental contexts, where the banjo functioned as one voice among many. Here, it is the central force; it's heavy, resonant, and often ominous. Mountain States consciously resists the dogma that surrounds traditional banjo culture, where mastery is often measured by fidelity to inherited tunes. “I realized I needed to make a conscious decision to begin making modern solo banjo albums,” Bell says. “This record is part of that decision.”

The album’s conceptual core emerged early, even before its final tracklist. The title Mountain States expands the idea of “mountain music” beyond Appalachia to include the Rocky Mountains of the American West, where Bell has spent most of his life. Rather than pastoral warmth, these pieces evoke something starker: arid landscapes, desolation, stoicism, and slow-moving gravity. Once that state of being was defined, the record cohered quickly.

Sonically, Mountain States recontextualizes the banjo’s familiar timbre. Brightness gives way to shadow; twang to weight. Bell draws deeply on the instrument’s capacity for drone, using open tunings, repetitive ostinatos, and the clawhammer style’s driving pulse, then sustains those tensions far longer than tradition usually allows. The result approaches trance and flow, especially on longform pieces like “Evening Primrose,” “Old Blood,” and “Secret Cities,” where banjo lines unfold against dense foundations of shruti box, fiddle drones, bowed cymbals, synth, and distorted electric guitar.

There are clear but unconventional lineages at work. One is American Primitivism, with Bell positioning the banjo alongside the guitar as a vehicle for expansive, exploratory solo music. The other is less expected: Progressive Metal, particularly its use of low tunings, odd meters, and crushing tonal mass. Traditional banjo rhythms still haunt the record, but their usual cheer is replaced with melancholic refrains, stark drones, and forbidding textures.

Mountain States was co-produced with Andrew Weathers, whose role was crucial to its immersive feel. Over three focused days, Bell and Weathers tracked banjo performances first, favoring mood over technical perfection, then built outward through intuitive, collaborative arrangement. Weathers added layered synths, Rhodes accents, distorted electric guitar, and subtle structural shifts that deepen the music’s sense of scale. One defining technical choice came from Bell’s desire for the banjo to sound as if “the listener was inside the instrument,” leading Weathers to mic the back of the banjo pot to capture its overlooked low end.

Visually, Mountain States is paired with artwork by Daniel McCoy Jr. (Muscogee Creek/Potawatomi), whose surreal, psychedelic reinterpretations of Southwestern landscapes mirror the album’s emotional terrain. The cover depicts New Mexico's Diablo Canyon, a site of deep personal significance for Bell, once a gathering place for teenage metal shows, now a place he visits with his children, rendered as something simultaneously familiar and alien.

At its core, Mountain States asks a simple but radical question: what does progressive banjo music sound like right now? Bell doesn’t answer by rejecting tradition outright, but by evolving it, pulling the banjo’s darker, heavier, and more resonant qualities into the present. Tracks like “Departure Valley,” the album’s earliest and philosophical cornerstone, and “Secret Cities,” a glimpse toward a future of dense, heavy instrumental banjo music, serve as clear waypoints.

If Mountain States communicates one essential truth, it’s this: the banjo is not a relic. In Bell’s hands, it becomes a modern foundation for contemporary progressive instrumental music, haunted by history, grounded in place, and unafraid to sound massive."