Today, dance-floor innovators Hot Chip returned with a new single "Down" and news of a new album called Freakout/Release coming out August 19 via Domino. The album title captures exactly how we've all been feeling over the last few years, with the promise of catharsis that we all desperately need. "You've got to use me until I run out of juice," Alexis Taylor asserts on the single over a looped sample of Universal Togetherness Band’s “More Than Enough” and joyous percussion. There are some click-clacky snaps, razor-sharp guitar shards, and enrapturing basslines. Coupled with Taylor's vocals that detail euphoric collapse, the quintet have made an exciting return to a strobe-lit club.
The single was the first song to be fleshed out for Freakout/Release, which saw the band reuniting to work on music for the first time time since touring 2019’s A Bath Full of Ecstasy. “By the time we were able to be back together, we were turning on a tap and having a lot of ideas being poured out quite quickly,” Taylor shared. Joe Goddard revealed that the forthcoming album began intuitively rather than with a conceptual map, “in a natural way, without too much discussion or a grand plan.”
The group was also inspired by Beastie Boy's “Sabotage,” which they covered on tour. "The idea of being out of control is always there in dance music, in a positive sense,” the band's Al Doyle added. “We were living through a period where it was very easy to feel like people were losing control of their lives in different ways,” Goddard said. “There’s a darkness that runs through a lot of those tracks.”
The song also comes with a video by former Jesus and Mary Chain member Douglas Hart and Pulp’s Steve Mackey. Check it out below.
