HOT CHIP

Freakout/Release is the continuation of what, at this point, seems like an impossible run for Hot Chip. The British electronic pop legends’ eighth album is another dizzying peak in a multi-decade career that’s seen Hot Chip continuing to innovate and develop a rich, resonant songcraft. And while they continue to operate at peak form, Freakout/Release also feels like a new chapter for the group - a collection of flesh-and-blood songs that finds the band reaching into the darkness to emerge as a true creative unit, their gazes fixed positively on the future ahead.

Over the last 18 years, Hot Chip have established themselves among similar British luminaries like Pet Shop Boys and Depeche Mode - a true gap-bridging between the worlds of pop and dance music, with a catalog of songs that move bodies and touch hearts with equal impact. Along with a multiple-night residency planned at the prestigious Brixton Academy this fall, the eleven songs on Freakout/Release are evidence that the band’s not even close to slowing down - even as it’s clear that the weight of the world has seeped into these tunes’ nooks and crannies.

Freakout/Release was written and recorded in the band’s newly minted studio, Relax & Enjoy in East London, a creative space that Al Doyle put together before and during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. “It was a space I built with making Hot Chip records in mind,” he explains. “As a group of people, we’re quite impatient - it’s not always fun when you’re in the studio and it’s taking time to set something up before you can execute an idea. Everything’s on all the time, and it’s very easy to capture what we’re doing.”

Coalescing in the studio was essential in establishing Freakout/Release’s lively, full-band sound- and it marked the first time the band was able to be in the same room together following touring behind 2019’s A Bath Full of Ecstasy, which ended right before the beginning of the pandemic. Fittingly, harnessing Hot Chip’s irreplicable live energy in a studio space was in the front of the band’s mind, as they found themselves particularly inspired by their cover of Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” that’s become a setlist staple.