to The Beach Boys, and underground club culture, encapsulated by their love of garage, techno and house. Despite being best known within the confines of the band, the duo, who met at school in Putney, also began DJing at around the same time that they started Hot Chip, recruiting multi-instrumentalists Owen Clarke, Felix Martin and Al Doyle — the latter two also DJs with a summer residency at Space, Ibiza — to join them in the creation of their own vision of pop in a post-modern, post-irony world, whilst also releasing mix albums such as Hot Chip’s entry in the DJ Kicks series. The first official hint of the new material was a YouTube video of ‘Flutes’, a slow-burning seven-minute epic beginning with off- kilter percussion and the hypnotic chanting of children, which evolves into the kind of otherworldly harmonics found in James Holden’s classic remix of Nathan Fake’s ‘The Sky Was Pink’. “That’s quite a particular reference in ‘Flutes’,” says Joe, discussing the way the pair construct their work. “What I like about the Nathan Fake track is that chords change at moments when you’re not really expecting them to. I love the development of that track, so I was thinking of it writing the chords for ‘Flutes’.”
“I
INSPIRED In fact, beginning with a specific artist, song or even album in mind turns out to be a common genesis when he or Alexis are writing. Joe relays how the influence of Nile Rodgers and Sister Sledge’s second album helped start ‘How Do You Do’, a joyous outpouring of appreciation, though Alexis counters that when he joined the process he was thinking more in terms of the early synthesiser sound of Yazoo’s ‘Situation’, while Prince’s ‘I Want to Be Your Lover’ is buried somewhere in the psyche of ‘Don’t Deny Your Heart’, which develops into hot guitar licks that even the purple one would be proud of. Then there’s the slow, reflective ‘Look At Where We Are’, which surprisingly emerged from Alexis’s love of vintage
R.Kelly. “It’s just a matter of choosing to try and create that same atmosphere sonically,” he replies, when we question the missing tales of half-eaten pies and midgets in cupboards associated with
R.Kelly. “He’s very hit and miss but when he’s good, I love some of his records. That album called ‘R’, a double album from the late ‘90s, has got loads and loads of amazing ballads on.”
n a groundbreaking move with someone talking about their new album, I think it’s the best thing so far,” deadpans Alexis Taylor, the bespectacled lead singer and joint songwriter of Hot Chip as he sits opposite bearded
writing partner and fellow vocalist Joe Goddard in a North London restaurant, all three of us tucking into a plate of hake. He’s referring to ‘In Our Heads’, Hot Chip’s fifth studio record which marks their debut on independent of repute Domino, a label who Alex once worked for in the band’s early days, and the common DJ Mag consensus is that these words aren’t mere hyperbole or artist immodesty.
Following 2010’s ‘One Life Stand’, a clunky but sincere title which could refer to the enduring support enjoyed by the London- based band — who received a Mercury Music Prize nomination for second album ‘The Warning’, following 2003’s debut ‘Coming On Strong’ but is instead about a heartfelt commitment to mating for life — ‘In Our Heads’ feels like it delves further into the songwriting pair’s collective unconscious, casting further light on Alexis and Joe’s ever-evolving maturity. While it evokes familiar themes such as loyalty, love, gratitude and a sense of responsibility sometimes askew in an electronic music scene recently accused of harbouring misogyny and sexism, it’s presented in the most accessible way yet. Or perhaps, as Alexi comments of their difficulty in finding new stuff to actually say about the band’s intent, it’s just that, “people are gradually noticing what we do”.
Certainly there has never been a more relevant time for Hot Chip’s blend of pop influences, which run from mainstream r&b
The great signifier of Hot Chip’s own unique voice and character — something that means they’ve left their own indelible mark on the musical landscape, another great British songwriting pairing — is that despite starting from such universally recognisable reference points, by the time their initial sketches have filtered through the rest of the band, they end up buried beneath layers and layers of input, like a thickly coated oil painting, until the finished piece is something that could only have come from the brush of Hot Chip themselves. The album’s debut single ‘Night And Day’, remixed as a one-sided 12” for Record Store Day by Daphne, aka Caribou’s Dan Snaith, is the first big shot at the festival crowds who they’ve been entertaining in abundance this summer, with a tour of America and Canada starting September 9. A darkly funky bass-led track with loose, live-sounding drums, on the surface it’s an unrestrained tale of sexual desire, but could equally be about Alexis and Joe’s primal need to make music, something that has fuelled Hot Chip’s ever-growing side projects including Joe’s The 2 Bears alongside Raf Rundell, Alexis’s Another Band and B & O, and more recently Felix and Al’s New Build.
LIFE-AFFIRMING It’s not necessarily the album’s most rousing moment either — opener ‘Motion Sickness’ as dizzyingly intoxicating as it sounds, synthetic end-of-level Final Fantasy trumpets lending it a triumphant air as Alexis calls attention to the life-affirming power of music with the lyric, “remember when we both first found the world of sound, the world is sound”, a cheeky 303 arriving to tip its hat to their love of classic old Chicago house records, while ‘Ends of The Earth’ (previously existing as an early live performance on YouTube from a couple of years ago) presents an ambiguous Mona Lisa smile, oblique in its meaning and reflecting whatever mood you bring to its evocative extended intro of ‘80s-style pitch-shifted vocals. “We recorded the vocal, but could then deconstruct it and play it manually with our hands on an MPC,” says Alexis, citing how artists like Prince would use the technique, presenting they
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