Hot Chip

“A Long Way From Kansas”, the new album by Hot Chip, reveals the band in its most primal light. By paraphrasing Le Magicien d’Oz, the title refers to Dorothy, her dog and the distance they had to travel to get home and find a semblance of normality.

The world seems to spin faster and faster, and its story becomes ever harder to decipher. Deaths, senseless wars, the climate catastrophe ravaging the seasons.

Responding to all this gloom, and echoing it through distortion and decadence, the band’s ninth album finds its own way of celebrating life even as everything around it is catching fire.

The visionary electronic group Hot Chip was formed in 2000, while each member was revelling 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 a body of eight albums that brings together reason, heart and body.

Yet when they arrived at Joe and Al’s studio, “Relax and Enjoy”, located in east London, at the start of this year to record their new album, *A Long Way From Kansas*, the band members felt they had to confront the stories unfolding before their eyes and the nagging questions they raised.

Alexis Taylor: “A Long Way From Kansas” reflects the general sense that the world we live in — the one in which we recorded our album — is particularly harsh, discordant, violent and depressing.

All of this may be nothing new, and it does not mean that every song is about the world, politics or genocide, but it was an unavoidable backdrop throughout the making of this album.