The career retrospective is something of a lost art in the streaming era. But the indietronica institution Hot Chip have tackled theirs with aplomb. True to form for a group that balances earnestness with a finely honed deadpan sensibility, Joy in Repetition encases a few emotional truths within a self-deprecating title. The main reference is the chorus of 2005’s “Over and Over,” the London quintet’s breakthrough single and defining hit. More broadly, the album title captures both the essence of dance music and Hot Chip’s penchant for borrowing: They nicked it from Prince.
To their credit, Hot Chip never hid their debts—they said they were down with Prince from the beginning. The band didn’t set out to be a dance-rock powerhouse that would remix the singles of half the Western world. “We didn’t have the production value to do a Destiny’s Child-style show,” singer Alexis Taylor said in 2016. “And yet, that was the music that was exciting to us. We weren’t referencing the tradition of New Order or Depeche Mode.” They were five young multi-instrumentalists who shared an interest in Black pop and indie rock, a combination that was quickly becoming the default for a generation of hipsters. Their 2004 debut, Coming on Strong, was as overloaded as the fake synth on the cover: soul balladry and back-porch picking, smooth sax solos and tiny-desk techno. It was shaggy and languid and intimate, like the Beta Band if they were into Angie Stone instead of the Stone Roses.
Coming on Strong is the only Hot Chip album not represented here, possibly because it received the deluxe-reissue treatment last year, or because its muted, bedroom-to-blogroll aesthetic—to say nothing of its crazy-ass white-boy lyricism—might slouch in the presence of sturdier company. (It’s spiritually represented by “Look at Where We Are,” a Rodney Jerkins-style ballad from 2012 that’s only R&B by process of elimination.) The press material describes this collection as “less a Best Of, more like a Best Loved”—their most popular live songs, in other words. (Only studio recordings are included: no live versions, and no remixes of their own songs or others’.)The phrasing suggests yet another, more cynical riff on the title: the complacent audience, craving more of the same.
But Hot Chip never fell into that trap, even as they became a pop commodity. Visiting his girlfriend in New York, Taylor happened to run into James Murphy and Jonathan Galkin of DFA Records; Hot Chip signed with DFA soon afterward. The move felt like a fait accompli at the time, and even though Taylor and Joe Goddard remained the band’s producers, 2006’s The Warning had the whiff of DFA’s astringent house style. Going forward, Hot Chip’s timbres were crisper, their mixes were fuller, the saxes now skronked. Soul signifiers took a backseat to gurning electro, a sound the band metabolized with startling ease.
“Over and Over” was The Warning’s lead single, a rumbling dance-rocker with an aversion to repetition, if not dance itself. Yes, there’s the requisite martial disco beat and a classic spelled-out breakdown. There’s also bluesy organ and ska upstroke whose filthy tone was indebted to Taylor’s love of Royal Trux. (The scuzz-rock duo also influenced the lyrics: Taylor’s line about “a monkey with a miniature cymbal” was inspired by a joke credit from the 2002 Trux album Hand of Glory.) The supremely horny “Night and Day,” from 2012’s In Our Heads, was late to the electroclash party. But like any decent latecomer, Hot Chip entered the room with shock-and-awe charisma, pulling faces and pushing lines (“The walls that fall around ourselves would celebrate our night”) that would make TV on the Radio blush.
Though Hot Chip found camaraderie in America (tours with !!! and Black Dice, remixing everyone from Le Tigre to Stephen Malkmus), they remained a band apart, untethered to any particular scene and—unlike DFA heavyweights LCD Soundsystem, with whom they would eventually share guitarist Al Doyle—unburdened by the arc of music history. Their teachers were more likely to be wrestlers than DJs; even as their studio output turned to ecstatic house and end-credits synth pop, they relished taking the unexpected lyrical turn: boasting about being the best thing since “Le Freak,” endorsing an obscure Sun Ra Arkestra live album. If Hot Chip could never write something as jolting as “you’re smaller than my wife imagined,” James Murphy would never write a line like “you’re like Andre the Giant on his way to school,” let alone nest it in a tender Balearic boogie like “Eleanor,” from 2022’s Freakout/Release.
That tenderness helped distinguish Hot Chip from the legions of opportunistic dance punks. Originally, Taylor shared vocal duties with the droller, deeper Goddard. But as the jams got more existential, the band started foregrounding the former’s vulnerability. In time, Taylor became one of the great synth-pop tenors, part of a lineage stretching from Green Gartside and Neil Tennant to Abel Tesfaye. On 2008’s electro bitpop ballad “Ready for the Floor,” Taylor’s guilelessness turns a plea to dance (“Instead of carving up the wall/Why don't you open up with talk?”) into a scented invitation, rather than a negotiating tactic. Goddard’s the wingman, crooning an inside joke from Tim Burton’s Batman in platonic reverie. Hot Chip’s only UK Top Ten single to date, “Ready for the Floor” is pure pop, closer in spirit to “Beautiful Girls” than Boys Noize. It’s also, somewhat curiously, the only track from its album on here.
The sequencing on Joy in Repetition is puzzling in general: It’s not constructed like a Hot Chip setlist, but neither is it chronological. Only once do tracks from the same album appear consecutively. It feels like a pointed attempt to play up the band’s consistency. Fair enough—running the same lineup out for two decades makes them the bloghouse U2. And if the back half gets a little ballad-heavy, well, so will most of us eventually. A key reason Hot Chip’s never really had a dud album in a quarter-century is that they treat sincerity as another stem to adjust in the mix. The titular pun of 2010’s “One Life Stand” is still groan-inducing, but the synchronized slink of synth bass, drums, and steelpan creeps like a cat burglar. (As a bonus, Goddard’s ghostly plea to “keep on feeling” anticipates the more plaintive moments on The King of Limbs.) Right as the celestial synth pop of 2019’s “Melody of Love” hits peak time, Hot Chip splice in a live cut from the Mighty Clouds of Joy: a seamless spiritual relay.
The one new track is “Devotion,” a showstopping slab of new-wave twinkle. Outside of a killer opening punchline (“I don’t feel emotion/It completely takes over me”), it’s uncomplicated and blissful, a portrait of codependence that begs to be read as a you’re-the-real-stars diva move. It’s a victory lap, and I don’t begrudge it. But Hot Chip are far more compelling when they’re navigating the course. On “Flutes,” the epic prog-house delirium keeps getting punctuated with rote marching orders: “Inside, outside, left side, work the floor/Inside, outside, up top, down with more”. The 2015 synth-funk monster “Huarache Lights”—a mid-career triumph, up there with the band’s best—opens with Taylor getting a contact high from stage lights reflecting off the crowd’s footwear: literal shoegazing. Everything afterward is a slow-onset panic attack about dance-music obsolescence. “Replace us with the things that do the job better,” he chants at the end. You can hear it first as fear, then as a dare: the revelations of repetition.
