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Aug 02, 2022 By Mark Redfern Photography by Pooneh Ghana

Hot Chip are releasing a new album, Freakout/Release, on August 19 via Domino. Now they have shared its third single, title track “Freakout/Release.” “Music used to be escape, now I can’t escape it,” sings frontman Alexis Taylor at the start of the truly funky song. Listen below, followed by the band’s upcoming tour dates.

Taylor had this to say about the song in a press release: “‘Freakout/Release’ is about pent-up energy and the need for release, and escape. It’s also about making sense of music, and at times being plagued by the thing you focus on—music never leaves my head for a second, which is usually a good feeling, but it can feel claustrophobic at times too. It’s also about finding your place in relation to music and to performing. The riff should feel brutal and dumb and elemental and Joe [Goddard] was thinking about [The White Stripes] ‘Seven Nation Army’ and the simplicity of that swinging from quiet to loud and back and forth.”

Previously Hot Chip shared the album’s first single, “Down,” via a video for it. “Down” was one of our Songs of the Week. Then they shared its second single, “Eleanor,” also one of our Songs of the Week.

Hot Chip features Owen Clarke, Al Doyle, Joe Goddard, Felix Martin, and Alexis Taylor. Freakout/Release is the follow-up to 2019’s A Bath Full of Ecstasy. It was recorded at the band’s own Relax & Enjoy Studio in East London, which Doyle had put together before the pandemic and during COVID-19’s first year. The sound of the album was inspired by the band’s cover of Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage,” which they often perform live. “The idea of being out of control is always there in dance music, in a positive sense,” said Doyle, in a previous press release, of the cover’s influence on the album.

“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,” added Taylor.

Goddard said current times influenced the album’s lyrics. “We were living through a period where it was very easy to feel like people were losing control of their lives in different ways,” he explained. “There’s a darkness that runs through a lot of those tracks.”

The album features Canadian rapper Cadence Weapon on “The Evil That Men Do,” British DJ and musician Lou Hayter on “Hard to Be Funky,” and production duo Soulwax on the album’s title track.

In 2020, Hot Chip teamed up with Jarvis Cocker for the new song “Straight to the Morning,” which was #1 on our Songs of the Week list but isn’t featured on the new album. They also shared a Dillon Francis remix of the song. In 2021, Goddard teamed up with New York City based singer/songwriter Amy Douglas as HARD FEELINGS and they released their self-titled debut album in November via Domino. Last year Hot Chip also produced Girl Ray’s “Give Me Your Love” single and this March Ibibio Sound Machine released a new Hot Chip-produced album, Electricity.

Hot Chip Tour Dates:

August 5th – Junction 1 Summer Series, Glasgow
August 6th – Wide Skies & Butterflies, Norfolk
August 18th – Banquet @ PRYZM, Kingston
August 19th - Resident @ Chalk, Brighton
August 23rd - Rough Trade East, London (DJ set)
September 2nd – Cala Mijas Festival, Malaga
September 21st – o2 Academy Brixton, London
September 22nd – o2 Academy Brixton, London
September 23rd – o2 Academy Brixton, London
September 24th – o2 Academy Brixton, London
October 1st – Tempodrom, Berlin
October 2nd – Live Music Hall, Cologne
October 3rd – AB Ballroom, Brussels
October 5th – Tivoli Ronda, Utrecht
October 8th – Olympia, Paris

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