Hot Chip announce new album A Long Way From Kansas
Today, Hot Chip announce their ninth album A Long Way From Kansas - set for release on January 8th, it finds the band at their most primal. Paraphrasing The Wizard of Oz, the title is a nod towards Dorothy, her dog and the distance they needed to travel to get back home and find some sense of normality.
The first single to be shared from the record is “Random Violence”, a majestic tribute to Optimo’s Keith McIvor which sets the tone for the album. A passionate socialist, Keith (aka JD Twitch) was a DJ, a curator and one of the country’s most forward-thinking promoters, a man who inspired the power of positivity in the people he worked with and played for — an effect echoed in what Al Doyle calls the song’s “human connection”.
Photo Credit: Fiona Garden
Joe Goddard says: “Last year in September our old friend and brilliant DJ Keith McIvor of Optimo in Glasgow passed away after a diagnosis of an inoperable brain tumour a few months earlier. He largely inspired the words of the song. He was a passionate music lover and a staunch believer in socialism. Many of the words relate directly to his death and to memories of being in Sub Club in Glasgow where we met 20 years ago.”
On “Random Violence”, Goddard sings: “And your friends will tell their stories / About a man who spent his life / Sending songs out into the world / Tall ships in the wind” before Alexis Taylor joins and proclaims: “You gave me something to believe in.”
The world seems to be spinning faster, its story harder to read. Deaths, wars for no reason, the climate catastrophe burning through the seasons. Reactive to all that bleakness, and echoing it with distortion and decay, Hot Chip’s new album A Long Way From Kansas finds its own way to celebrate life even as the edges all around it burn.
Visionary electronic band Hot Chip formed in 2000, as each member basked in the warmth of the millennium’s glow. In the days, months and years that followed, Alexis Taylor, Joe Goddard, Owen Clarke, Al Doyle and Felix Martin channelled love and harmony through their art, creating an eight-album arc that melds the brain, the heart and the feet. Yet when they arrived at Joe and Al’s East London studio, Relax and Enjoy, earlier this year to record their new LP, A Long Way From Kansas, the band felt they had to confront those unfolding stories and those nagging questions.
Alexis Taylor: “A Long Way From Kansas reflects the general sense that the world we live in — the world we were making our record in — is particularly harsh, discordant, violent and depressing. Maybe none of that’s new, and that doesn’t mean that every song is talking about the world and politics and genocide, but it was an unavoidable backdrop while making the music. Distortion came to be a bit of a watchword for the whole record.”
In Kansas, notes flay, loops crunch into one another, and vocals leave loose ends open as each track mutates in its own unique way. Among that dirtiness and distortion, Beth Ditto and Eddie Chacon add their inimitable voices to A Long Way From Kansas, each bringing their own glorious, soulful light to the album. Alexis elaborates: “In addition to myself and Joe, Owen and Felix are singing (Felix for the first time on a Hot Chip record), there’s also a choir and lots of group singing. I think we like opening out our interior world and bringing all these voices together.”
Those voices have helped to create the perfect Hot Chip album. A beaming signal arriving just in time to remind the listener that no matter how bad the outside world is, there’s no place like home, whether that’s surrounded by like-minded souls on the dancefloor or closing the curtains in your own living room. Tonally dark and sonically ecstatic, odder, noisier, stranger and better, A Long Way From Kansas shows that Hot Chip know the way back home.
