Dave Hollier, the band’s lead singer and primary songwriter, moved back to his native Montana in 2017, following extended stints in the Brooklyn and Los Angeles music scenes. Veering from one geographic extreme to another, Hollier moved to Brooklyn in the mid-1980s and his musical parameters exploded overnight. There was salsa and merengue music on the streets, old- school rap in the clubs; Hollier spent time in nightclubs like Danceteria and was turned on to everyone from the Beastie Boys to Sly and Robbie. It was a personal tragedy that led Hollier to commit seriously to his own music. “My brother was a musician,” Hollier says, “and he was much more advanced musically than I was.” In 1998, Hollier’s brother died of a drug overdose, right around the time the two brothers had begun playing together. Hollier decided to carry on the musical torch. “I feel like, in some way, he passed that on to me,” Hollier says. “I felt like, ‘OK, this is something I can do.’” When Dave Hollier spins records at a party, he plays stuff that’s all over the map. The Meters, The Knife, Boston, Bowie, Buck Owens. It could go very wrong. But it doesn’t. Finding the thread that leads from The Cars to The Beastie Boys to Van Halen to Prayers, he tells a long, beautiful, cross-cultural, multi-generational story. Hollier’s band King Ropes is doing much the same thing.