Fear not, fans of fried starch and electro music, thereisa new Hot Chip album in the works. When asked what food it most resembles, Al Doyle laughs: “Well, I think right now it would kind of be a dinner of sauces; it hasn’t got a lot of shape to it. Or sort of a jelly shape, because it’s still setting in the refrigerator. [But] we’re quite a way through; I’d say we’ve probably got about ten or 12 songs floating around. We’re in the studio right now.”
Historically, it’s been a one-every-two-years release program for Hot Chip, but this time around the guys are taking their time after an intense touring schedule and a number of other endeavours. With albums due from Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard’s respective side projects, along with one from Doyle and Felix Martin’s New Build, Doyle says, “Three albums in your year off is not too bad going for a band, so we’ll be back with the new Hot Chip album sometime next year, maybe.”
In the meantime, Doyle spends his nights DJing with Taylor and Martin as Hot Chip DJs. When it comes to whether or not he takes requests, he laughs again – “I’m against, I’m completely against!” – but he’s figured out a polite response. “What I usually say is, ‘I haven’t got that one, but I’ll ask Felix or Alexis if maybe they’ve got it,’ and so it’s a technique of deflecting those questions because then it seems like they’re the arsehole, rather than me.” But at festivals, requests often aren’t too much of a problem. “Unfortunately we’re usually quite far away from the audience to get requests, which I don’t really like. I like to be close, but not soclose that they can physically get to me – that’s my preferred situation.”
Hot Chip DJs will appear at the inaugural Holeandcorner festivals next month in Melbourne and Sydney, following a set in Brisbane. “I don’t know what it’s going to be like in Australia, but hopefully it’ll be fun,” says Doyle. “It’s quite a punishing schedule and quite busy days and everything, so I’m a bit worried about getting overtired, but I’ll have to figure out some strategies to deal with that because Sydney’s towards the end.”
Doyle also played with LCD Soundsystem in between Hot Chip commitments, finishing up at their Madison Square Garden finale in 2011. “It was a strange period, because the final show we played for about four hours and we’d already played four other shows that week, so there was a lot of exhaustion and a lot of emotion flying around. I’d been playing with LCD for about five years so it felt really absorbing – the reality of what we were doing and the show itself was kind of a distraction from the moment. If we’d really been thinking about it coming to an end I don’t think we would have been able to play a tour!”
While LCD Soundsystem took over the globe with their trademark sound, Hot Chip have a distinct signature of their own. “I think a lot of it is to do with the vocal presence,” says Doyle. “I think Alexis has got a very unusual voice, and one of the strongest pop voices of the 2000s and now, in my opinion. Being with him onstage, everyone sort of thinks he has this high-pitched voice, but it’s always the loudest thing onstage; it’s incredible. You don’t really have to cue it or do anything to it, just put it on top of the track and it just sounds really great. And Joe’s voice I think is really unusual and works really, really well, so a big part of the Hot Chip sound seems to be that.“
It all means that even when the band members are working on different projects, their sonic identity remains intact. “There’s the other kind of things that we’ve been doing, I suppose, progressing to an ever more dancey sort of sound, and keeping it really live-feeling. I think those are the kind of things that tie in together, and that gives it a lot of scope.
“For instance, we’ve just done this cover of [‘Atomic Bomb’] by a Nigerian musician called William Onyeabor that’s coming out on David Byrne’s label, Luaka Bop. It’s a kind of dubby, funky, and quite a strange song that doesn’t really sound like anything else, particularly that Hot Chip’s done – but it still sounds like Hot Chip, basically, so I think it’s something that happens when you have that same bunch of musicians. It just sounds like a particular thing, and if you try and overthink it too much you get a little trapped, or paralysed really.”
It’s irresistible to ask Doyle one final question – how do the guys actually feel about hot chips, anyway? He laughs and says, “I mean, we like them. Owen [Clarke] always said, when you’re travelling ’round, ’cause you’re always worried about eating dodgy food, he says, ‘You can’t get sick of chips.’”
Catch Hot Chip DJs at Holeandcorner 2014 at Home Nightclub on Sunday June 8, tickets through Moshtix.
