Mt. Kili: Kyle, and the Art of Paying Attention
I'm gonna bet you've had a week like this. The kind where the days blur and the small things slide past unnoticed, and by Friday you cannot say what any of it was for. Mt. Kili made a record for that exact feeling, and a song that stops it cold.
"Kyle" is the song to start with. It sits near the end of The Noticer, the Asheville trio's second album, and it is a memorial: a close friend gone too young, remembered without melodrama, carried by Rick Sichta's quiet, trembling vocal and Laney Barnett's violin swelling underneath like weather moving in. When the band was asked which song introduces a new listener to Mt. Kili, drummer Matt Shepard named this one. It holds everything the band does in a few minutes: stillness, attention, and grief handled with open hands.
The Noticer came out March 7, 2026, and it grew out of something smaller. Sichta started Mt. Kili writing lullabies for his twin daughters at home. The debut, Ten Songs for My Girls, for Now and Later, was exactly that. The second record keeps the intimacy and widens it, recorded at Asheville's Echo Mountain Studio with Grammy winner Julian Dreyer engineering and two-time Grammy winner David Glasser mastering. Ten songs about paying attention to the weather, to the people next to you, to the small things that turn out not to be small. Obscure Sound called it among the strongest folk albums of 2026.
There is a film for "Kyle," too: the whole song told in ten photographs, drifting past at the speed of memory. Watch it once and you will understand why this band's next record is called Ikigai, a reason for being. It arrives May 1, 2027, and the band tapes a live set for Red Barn Radio in Lexington, Kentucky, on February 17.
Start here
- "Kyle," for the heart of it
- "Her Song," Sichta's own pick, for the two voices and the violin at their gentlest
- "The Noticer," the title track, for the full trio in one song
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