Hot Chip

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Rhythm as ritual. Magic in motion. Joy in Repetition. More than two decades and eight studio albums in, Hot Chip remain as vital as ever: playful, profound and perpetually locked in the groove. This is their first anthology, mapping out an artistic evolution from DIY beginnings into “the greatest British pop group of their generation” (the Guardian) with six Top 20 albums, a Mercury Music Prize nomination, sell-out residencies at Brixton Academy and who’ve collaborated over the years with David Byrne, Jarvis Cocker, Robert Wyatt, Brian Eno and more. It’s a collection shaped by dancefloors, bedroom studios, festival stages and friendship. The album’s title – alluding to both the lyrics of their career-defining track and one of Alexis Taylor’s favourite Prince songs – captures something elemental about the band: a fascination with rhythm, sure, but also the exuberant act of making those things, together, over and over and over and over and over. 

Following Coming On Strongerer, last year’s 20th anniversary reissue, Joy in Repetition picks up where their 2004 debut left off, with Taylor, Joe Goddard, Owen Clarke, Al Doyle and Felix Martin as a fully realised group. The anthology is less a Best Of, more like a Best Loved – a collection of tracks that have connected during their thrilling live shows and have taken on a life of their own beyond the original recorded versions. Consider the delirious, subaqueous Clavinet riff of ‘Boy From School’, the radiant synth-pop chorus of ‘Melody of Love’ and the off-kilter techno pulse of ‘Flutes’: Hot Chip’s discography dives deep into dedication – to the beat and to each other – and shows how it can lead somewhere surprising, even transcendent.

Repetition is more than a compositional tool for Hot Chip; it’s a philosophy. “There’s joy in doing something again and again,” says Taylor. “That’s true of rhythms, of grooves and of making records together for 20 years. We’re still doing it. We still love doing it.” There have been numerous side projects over the years and parallel careers, notably Al Doyle joining LCD Soundsystem in 2005, but Hot Chip always return to each other. It’s a sentiment encapsulated by new song ‘Devotion’, which closes the compilation. A buoyant whirl of psych-pop that calls to mind The Beach Boys sipping Piña Coladas with Hall & Oates and asks for a rock in uncertain times, the song is “a celebration of the devotion to doing this project together,” Taylor continues, as well as their devotion to their craft. “I think of Joe as being like Brian Wilson, with this huge dedication to finding how to make the most amazing pop music,” he adds. 

Though they’d bristle at the weighty notion of their ‘legacy’, the band have been delicately contemplating the “essence of Hot Chip” of late. Are they festival favourites doing it for the misfits? Outsiders who’ve burrowed their own lane between indie, dance and pop? A band on a mission to find humanity in the machinery? Or one whose longevity, as Pitchfork once wrote, “is proof positive that you can build a band around the concept of ‘emotional intelligence’?” 

All of the above. Joy in Repetition opens with ‘Ready For The Floor’, a track that in some ways lays out Hot Chip’s musical manifesto. It went top 10 in the UK in 2008 and was Grammy nominated, despite being an unconventional pop song “full of bizarre sounds,” says Taylor. Like its twin flames ‘Over And Over’ and ‘Boy From School’ from 2006’s The Warning, the song eschewed cliche, hotwired the melancholic to the effervescent, mine-swept through genres with whatever equipment they had available, and aimed this concoction squarely at a writhing dancefloor. “The magic of those early tracks was that we didn’t know what we were doing,” says Doyle. “We were reaching for something we didn’t quite have the technical ability to achieve. That made the result more interesting and has stood the test of time.” 

In the beginning, Hot Chip were more homespun than the well-oiled band of today. The origin myth goes that Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard met at school in south London, in the early 90s, and bonded over alt-country, 90s R&B and the Beastie Boys. They started making offbeat funk in Goddard’s bedroom, melding these disparate influences using a modest set-up of computer, keyboards, guitars and bongos. Though it was unusual at the time, “we were early adopters of bedroom pop production, which is everywhere now,” says Goddard. The quiet ache of Taylor’s vocals contrasted Goddard’s raw baritone and collision of beats and formed the band’s signature dynamic and the remaining members, who Joe and Alexis had met through either school or university, joined the live show around 2004’s Coming On Strong. 

Joy In Repetition marks the point that Hot Chip morphed from those lo-fi beginnings into totally embracing the party. In a Hot Chip way, of course. They were influenced by LCD Soundsystem and DFA Records – eventually briefly signing to the New York label for their Over and Over EP in 2005 – but also Royal Trux, disco, Devo, obscure Warp records and Steve Reich’s tape-looping minimalism. “We were conscious of blending influences from different places and allowing it all to breathe in the mix,” says Taylor. It was chaotic, but never forced. Their reputation as selectors, meanwhile, encouraged an increasingly omnivorous approach to genre and some killer remixes, including Amy Winehouse’s ‘Rehab’ to N.E.R.D. and Nelly Furtado’s ‘Hot-n-Fun’, while the likes of world-renowned dance producers Erol Alkan, Carl Craig and Caribou would supply fire reworks of Hot Chip’s own tracks. At the time, Hot Chip were one of the first groups to have DJ careers alongside their band. “We were doing Hot Chip gigs, DJ sets as Hot Chip, solo DJ gigs, DJing with LCD and even, in my case, playing with LCD,” says Doyle. “For a solid 10 years, it was nonstop. We were structuring the live set like a DJ set – the transitions, the pacing, the energy.” 

Hot Chip released The Warning in 2006, then 2008 follow-up Made In The Dark, and found crossover success. But even as their music soundtracked every indie disco across the country, they stood apart, resisting the conventional image of mid-2000s indie-rock. “We weren’t macho, we were more fragile – and I see that as a positive,” says Goddard, while Doyle agrees: “We were presenting a different kind of masculinity – softer, more vulnerable – and we embraced that. We were welcomed by London’s queer scene from the start, playing queer clubs. We didn’t want to be the leather-jacketed, shades-wearing cool guys. That was never us.”

Instead, they reached further towards tenderness. The mechanical soul of One Life Stand (2010) had a newfound directness and lushness, distilling influences all the way from UK funky to The Blue Nile. It was the first record Hot Chip had made beyond the bedroom, with the band working out of the east London studio that Doyle and Goddard still run to this day. You can hear that collective freedom on ‘I Feel Better’, their live show’s jubilant finale and the penultimate track on Joy…, as they invited outside collaborators into their world. “It was exciting for us to combine eras of London music and nightlife on that song,” says Goddard. “UK funky was having a moment, but then there’s Charles Hayward from post-punk legends This Heat on drums and Fimber Bravo’s steelpan too.”

In Our Heads (2012) marked the next chapter, their first release with long-standing home Domino and one which deepened their technical chops with engineer Mark Ralph. They continued to kick against conformity, from the deadpan rap of ‘Night And Day’ to ‘Look At Where We Are’, their idiosyncratic take on Rodney Jenkins-era R&B. Lyrically, too, there were ‘adult’ themes of family, faith and fidelity, a maturity and authenticity that was rare in dance-pop at the time. “We’ve found a way of being in a band that accepts getting older and who we are,” says Clarke. “We never had to pretend to be rock stars.” 

They leaned into this idea on 2015’s Why Make Sense?, an album that also stepped up their sonic sheen and emotional punch. The memorable lyrics atop ‘Huarache Lights’s lambent motorik chug evoked both the heady adventure of London clubland (in this case, a night out at Plastic People) and a consideration of their place within it. “Am I so truthful or in truth / Is the youth just getting old?” asked Taylor. But there were also songs that started to look more outward too. House ballad ‘Need You Now’, built around samples from a 1983 Sinnamon track, saw Taylor hoping for comfort in a world threatened by crushing external forces. “There’s definitely been a shift,” notes Martin. “Alexis and Joe write with more of a sense of emotional connection now. It’s still very personal and intimate, but also geared toward universality. Singing in front of thousands of people makes you want the lyrics to connect on a bigger level.”

There is a certain bittersweetness to looking back at Hot Chip’s catalogue, a lifetime of innocence and experience in one tracklist. There are songs that have come out of loss or global catastrophes, personnel who’ve come and gone, or those who have been born since the band began – like their children, who do backup vocals on ‘Eleanor’ from 2022’s Freakout/Release. And there are those who are no longer here, such as Philippe Zdar of Cassius, who co-produced 2019’s A Bath Full Of Ecstasy and passed away suddenly, two days before its release. The band remember their time with Zdar at Motorbass Studios in Paris incredibly fondly, and endlessly euphoric tracks like ‘Positive’ and ‘Hungry Child’ are testament to this unbridled time. “It was such a life affirming experience,” says Martin. “He was able to see unique things about each of us, individually and collectively, and tried to nurture those things and represent them on a record.” 

If you could point the compass at where Hot Chip are at musically now, ‘life-affirming’ seems apt. Their last studio album, Freakout/Release, was an about turn, reflecting the collective anxiety, burnout and exhaustion of 2020-2021. It had an angrier, techno-punk energy, with the title track co-produced by their friends Soulwax. But the spirit of Joy In Repetition is in the band’s desire for the opposite: hopefulness, togetherness, unbridled ecstasy and increasingly, says Goddard, solidarity. ‘Devotion’ was recorded at Doyle and Goddard’s studio, Relax and Enjoy, where they give studio time to new artists and have produced for bands like Ibibio Sound Machine. The song was “one of the most collaborative we’ve ever made,” says Taylor, with their current live members including drummer Leo Taylor and multi-instrumentalist Rob Smoughton chipping in. “We’re still just in the studio together, messing about and trying to come up with ideas that sound interesting to us,” says Martin. “That’s the only real filter we’ve ever had.”

In that way, Joy in Repetition isn’t only a retrospective, it’s a document of Hot Chip’s commitment to joy, curiosity and each other. “It’s strange, you can’t go back to the feeling of those early days,” says Clarke. “But there’s something comforting about that. These records hold those memories for us. And it’s the shared experience that connects it all.”