Calling a band “an institution” can feel like putting them out to pasture, critically. It would be more accurate to peg Hot Chip, now on their eighth album, as a perpetual motion machine, rarely faltering – a particularly fine example of British engineering. It’s a surprise, then, when this theoretically urbane electronic outfit come to an abrupt halt because their beast of a drummer has burst the skin on his kick drum. And yet here is Hot Chip percussionist Leo Taylor, greeting the news that he’s been playing too hard by leaping up and doing some double devil’s horns to howls of approval.
Hot Chip have maintained a metronomic pulse at the heart of British song-making for more than 20 years, pairing Alexis Taylor’s sweet vocals with a kaleidoscopic range of percolating sounds. Over and Over was their first hit, in 2006. It remains not just a reworked live staple, faster and harder than the original, but something of a tenet for the band to live by. Hot Chip called their 2010 album One Life Stand, in part to explore the beauty of committed relationships as distinct from fraught one-night stands: another title-as-creed. They’ve never split up, directing any non-Chip energies into solo albums and record labels such as Greco-Roman, co-frontman Joe Goddard’s side gig. Both Taylor and Goddard have recently put out standalone works: Taylor’s touching lockdown meditation, Silence, in 2021, and Goddard’s disco- and house- fuelled outing with Amy Douglas, Hard Feelings, earlier this year.
