KIK enter release week with their debut album, NIGHTSHIFT, landing this Friday, November 28th, via Horror Vector. The project brings together Jonathan Uliel Saldanha and João Pais Filipe, two key figures in Portugal’s experimental scene whose work with HHY & The Macumbas channelled intensity through collective force. With Smoke Machine as the only single shared ahead of the album, KIK now unveil Proff exclusively on METAL; a premiere that offers a new angle on a record built inward, stripped back, and centred on rhythm as its core material.
If the first glimpses into NIGHTSHIFT showed the duo’s shift toward synthetic percussion and controlled tension, Proff introduces a different layer of their approach. The pulse moves more slowly, stretched across a subdued register that feels deliberate rather than softened. Instead of aiming for impact, Proff explores how rhythm can transform without leaving its core. As the artists note, the record grew from a process of sustained routine and shared discipline: “NIGHTSHIFT grew out of an odd sort of routine between us, stretches where we were in the studio almost every day with a simple aim: just make something. Anything. That steady repetition, even when it felt a bit monotonous, became the groundwork for what eventually turned into KIK.”
“KIK sit at the meeting point of two forces: rhythm and sound. One is an irregular pulse that bends your sense of time. The other is a restricted palette; each rhythm gets its own small world of sounds that evolve slowly as the track moves forward. Sometimes a kick will eventually turn into a synth or a wooden clave. The rhythm stays the same, but the elements inside it shift. The pattern holds, yet the sound keeps mutating, so there’s this feeling of a phase change, of something persisting but never totally fixed,” they add.
To explain how their rhythms shift without collapsing, KIK frame the idea through a striking musical analogy. “It’s a bit like playing a piano piece where, as it unfolds, the notes slowly take on new identities: a C becomes an A, a G becomes an E. The motif is still there, but the material keeps slipping. It changes how you hear it, and how you feel it. That tension — between staying the same and constantly becoming something else — is basically the heart of KIK: a rhythm that seems stable, but is always on the move.”
Proff embodies that principle with clarity. It maintains its structure while shifting from the inside out, offering one of the clearest windows into the logic driving NIGHTSHIFT, mastered by Frédéric Alstadt, designed by Dayana Lucas, with cover imagery by HMMIXPRO.