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F


ollowing the 20-year cycle of cultural revival, it’s not just ‘90s fashions and sample libraries that have come back around onto dancefloors. Buoyed by America’s repackaging of dance music as EDM and pop’s perpetual shapeshifting, house


music is finally back at the top of the charts. Major labels, sniffing a whiff of the glory days of Miami excess and padded expense accounts, are opening their chequebooks to the prospect of actually signing a Number One, vinyl sales are on the up and ‘deep house’ is youth culture’s newest point of entry to electronic music. The time is ripe for a group to emerge to define a generation, and that group is surely Hot Natured. “Lee and I were working on an album as Hot Natured, just the two of us, two winters ago,” explains ever amiable Welshman Jamie Jones, joint boss of Hot


Creations and Hot Natured founder alongside best friend Lee Foss, the Chicago-born DJ he met while working in Ibiza over a decade ago. The pair are joined by fellow band mates Ali Love and Luca C, aka Crosstown Rebels duo Infinity Ink, in a photo studio in East London, the area that fostered much of the group’s ambition and is still home when they’re not on the road. “We did probably sixty percent of an album which was quite underground, not what Hot Natured is now, more raw dancefloor tracks. Then as Ali got more and more involved, we thought, ‘You know what, let’s go to the next level with it’.”


SONGS Go to the next level they have, becoming a four-


man live act, signing their debut album ‘Different Sides Of The Sun’ (out on the 5th of August) to Pete Tong’s resurrected and Warner-backed FFRR label, and selling out their two debut live dates at Brixton Academy in April. What’s more, unlike Daft Punk’s


patchy curveball, which swung wide when it came to public reaction, ‘Different Sides Of The Sun’ screams its crossover credentials, sewing songs on everything from astrology and ancient Egypt to pop music’s most enduring interest, sex, into an electronic tapestry woven out of funk, cosmic disco and house music’s warmest, most accessible moments. It might suggest a far cry from the origins of the production name originally adopted by Jamie and Lee to unleash their now much-copied brand of darkly funky dancefloor groove, like the bass wonk of 2010’s ‘Equilibrium’. But as 2011’s club hit ‘Forward Motion’ hinted, the collaboration with Ali that first shifted the creative tiller, and UK Top 40 hit ‘Benediction’ proved, the track which introduced keys player Luca C to the band, a taste for proper songs is what ties all four members together and brings the Hot Natured story back to its roots. “2009 was the first time that we’d thrown the party,” says Lee when we ask about the origins of the band’s


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