If you've ever heard "Over and Over, from Hot Chip's second album, The Warning, you know about their particular brand of genius. They make what are basically catchy pop songs, but build them from the tools and effects of dance music -- albeit bedroom-produced dance music. The result is melodic indietronica with soul. "Over and Over, for instance, bubbles along atop an arrangement Brian Wilson could be proud of -- chimes and bells and glockenspiels -- and a bass line your ass cannot ignore. At Hot Chip's core are Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard, a pair of Brits who met at school and have been friends ever since, and the duo has upped the ante for the band's latest album, Made in the Dark, just released on Astralwerks. Yes, it has all the melody you've come to expect, but it has even more thump.

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Interview with Goddard

Your new album, Made in the Dark, sounds really up to the moment. It's a bit bigger and louder than the last two. To what extent do you listen to other stuff for inspiration and direction when you get ready to write and record?

We're always listening to a lot of different stuff. Tons of different new dance music. I visit a bunch of different record shops in London once, twice a week and just listen to what's going on. Minimalist stuff from Germany, stuff from France, stuff from the states, new house stuff from England. It's not one thing in particular that has made us go for this kind of harder sound, I guess we just wanted to make a kind of exciting and shocking record that has tracks that are going to sound big in a club. That's something that I've always found exciting, going to the club and hearing some crazy new record with like an insane bass line. I'm one of those people who'll run over to the DJ to find out what it is. So, I wanted to have a few songs on there to do that for people, hopefully. In terms of the bass and stuff, there is a lot of influence from Jamaican music.

More Jamaican influences on this record than on the previous?

I've always been listening to Jamaican producers. I guess that comes through in some of the rhythms on this record more. There's a song "One Pure Thought that has a kind of a reggaeton beat, which was probably from being in the States and hearing things like that. We haven't made a reggaeton tune, but there's an influence in terms of rhythms and things that comes from there.

Do you guys follow fashion and design as closely as you do music?

Well, there's certain things I like. I'm not the kind of guy who studies fashion the same way I study music. Some of the other guys like Al and Owen wear more suits. They're into Dior and YSL, classic French stuff. For me its more streetwear generally.

British bands often seem to pay more attention to the visual aspect of their identity. Starting out, was that something you thought about?

There are bands that appeal to me in that sense, bands that have a very strong visual aesthetic -- like Devo or something. Their whole look was totally structured. It was about being futuristic and totally out there. We're totally fans of that aesthetic. We haven't really done that ourselves because we find that amongst the five of us there are big differences in opinion as to what we should be doing visually, what we should be wearing. There are big differences in the music we listen to, as well, so we don't try to impose one kind of image onto all of us. We like to let people express themselves within the group, so we haven't gone with a strong visual theme with our clothes. We've thought about that often, about having a look, but we've just found that we just couldn't impose any one thing on everyone.

It must be gratifying to have seen a scene congeal around you guys. Now you represent the front edge of what's become a proper movement of dance-inflected indie, distinct from the whole electro thing.

Yeah, I think that is true. I see new groups making music and using electronic keyboards, synthesizers and drum machines, but kind of mixing it with a more sort of pop aesthetic and lyrics that deal with emotions rather than traditional club lyrics which are generally, "this is fun, we're having fun, we're at a party, this is great. I do feel a kind of pride in having influenced people. At the same time, I don't love all of that stuff. I tend to listen to more older music. I have been buying a lot of old Northern Soul and Philadelphia records like Teddy Pendergrass -- classic stuff. But it does feel great to feel like you've done something sort of new and feel as if people have been inspired by it.

Is your background mostly R&B, then, or did you grow up an indie kid?

I was a total indie kid for a long time, as well. I would be dressing in ripped jeans and DMs and listening to Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana and Pavement. But at the same time I loved Wu Tang Clan and Souls of Mischief and I loved going clubbing and listening to drum and bass -- like a lot of teenagers in big cities around the world who have these different sides to their musical life. Clubbing to one thing, listening to the Smiths still, and listening to Ol' Dirty Bastard and loving that. I was into all of those things from a young age. Alexis and I bonded over the Beatles and the Beastie Boys and a lot of more classic roots.

It seems like a really golden moment in music right now with the industry having imploded more or less -- people have a lot more open ears, so new and different kinds of music seem to translate better.

Yeah, people are starting to be more comfortable with music you can't really pigeonhole. I think that's because people's listening habits are changing. People will surf the web and download MP3s from a ton of different websites with different kinds of music. And people will be listening to their iPod and have two minutes of one song and then switch to a completely different type of music. That's how teenagers feel about music now. They want something different constantly, it seems. A lot of new English DJs now try to play as many tracks as they can within in an hour, they're dropping the hooks from a hundred different songs. So that seems to be how people like their music now. That kind of makes me feel like an older guy sometimes, because I'm loving old disco records and stuff right now, and having a groove play for like 12 minutes.

There's a whole slow disco movement now, whereas the trend always used to be speed.

There are definitely people saying ‘why does it have to be banging the whole time?' They're slowing the BPM down, under 120 BPM -- old disco is like 115 or so. And you can still have a groove, you can still have a crazy party when you're not playing the fastest record. Actually a lot of my friends have been feeling that recently and wanting to do that with their DJ sets. Then you get like the Scandinavian disco and they're totally doing that. Playing positive disco that's not banging. But still, German minimal techno is over 130 most of the time. So some of it has got that speed. Basically there are like 100 different niches. There's just like a million things going on. I really like to dip into all those things and see what I like about them -- to take influences from all of those bits and then make pop music with it.

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