Hot Chip: 'In Our Heads' - Album review

With a record in the shops every couple of years like clockwork since their debut, some side projects and approximately four billion DJ sets, it'd be pushing things to say that we've missed Hot Chip. Still, it's always a pleasure to catch up properly, and it probably won't surprise anyone to know that the follow-up to 2010's One Life Stand is yet another quietly brilliant collection of electronic pop.

Single 'Night & Day' comes slap-bang in the middle of the album and is a remix-friendly but dancefloor-ready stomper - a hi-energy sweat-drenched threesome between Scissor Sisters and techno revolutionary Juan Atkins.

Immediately following is that record's flipside 'Flutes', which piles on the acoustic layers in a seven-minute epic of overloaded emotion. As ever with Hot Chip, the lyrics on In Our Heads either play about with being clever/stupid/clever-clever ("I don't got no Abba/ I don't play no gabber") or tear you apart with tender simplicity ("A heart is not for breaking /It's for beating out all the life it needs to begin")

The sound of New Order at their bleepiest bleeds into much going on here ('These Chains', 'Ends of the Earth'), while 'Don't Deny Your Heart' is just a husky vocal and busted-up leather jacket away from fitting right in on an early '80s Madonna album.

The fusion of minor key ecstasy and uptempo melancholia of In Our Heads won't convert any doubters when it comes to Hot Chip. But perhaps for the first time over a full album, the band have completely succeeded in their slick combination of second-perfect metronomics, lush layering of sound and witty wordplay.

Tracks to download: 'Motion Sickness', 'These Chains', 'Flutes', 'Ends of the Earth'
If you like this, you'll like: New Order, Juan Atkins, Tom Tom Club

Watch the Hot Chip 'Night & Day' music video below