Two many years after their formation, Hot Chip have just about achieved nationwide treasure standing for his or her playful, soulful, typically biting, typically lovelorn tackle dance pop. They’ve by no means slouched – and but their forthcoming eighth album, Freakout/Launch, is a standout in a listing not quick on them, crammed with full-blooded pop songs that widen – and darken – the band’s traditional scope.
That includes Canadian rapper Cadence Weapon, The Evil That Males Do touches on racial stress and violence in opposition to ladies, whereas Not Alone despairs at fallen male heroes: “It’s by no means the heroines that permit us down,” sings frontman Alexis Taylor. There are starker private lows right here, too, with tracks akin to Damaged, Responsible and Out of My Depth nodding to the sense of lack of management that many individuals felt in the course of the sharp finish of the pandemic.
Reuniting was key to Freakout/Launch: the band constructed a brand new studio, Calm down and Get pleasure from, in 2019 and 2020, and at last bought to come back collectively to jot down and document as soon as lockdown restrictions lifted. The concept was to seize their formidable reside vitality – particularly their beloved reside cowl of Beastie Boys’s Sabotage – in addition to to evoke the joie de vivre that the late French producer Philippe Zdar dropped at their final album, 2019’s A Bath Full of Ecstasy. That vigour factors in the direction of an in the end optimistic album, one designed to assist shimmy out the tensions of contemporary life and acknowledge the great thing about survival.
You may ask them about any of that, collaborating with Jarvis Cocker, Katy Perry and Ibibio Sound Machine, performing as holograms throughout lockdown, their contribution to the Late Evening Tales compilation sequence, how they wrote the best music of all time (Over and Over, sustain) – and anything you want – when Joe Goddard and Al Doyle sit for the Guardian’s reader interview subsequent week.
Submit your questions within the feedback under and their solutions shall be printed on-line and in our Movie & Music part on Friday 5 August.