Electro-pop veterans Hot Chip are coming to save your summer. Freakout/Release, the British quintet’s eighth studio album, will arrive on August 19th via Domino, and today, they’ve given a sample of what’s to come with the lead single/album opener “Down.”
Hot Chip — Owen Clarke, Al Doyle, Joe Goddard, Felix Martin, and Alexis Taylor — wrote and recorded Freakout/Release in Doyle’s brand-new Relax & Enjoy Studio in East London, a creative space that was assembled during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Without losing the poppy charm that’s made Hot Chip so loved, this album promises deeper themes and more ominous emotions. “We were living through a period where it was very easy to feel like people were losing control of their lives in different ways,” Goddard said in a press release. “There’s a darkness that runs through a lot of those tracks.”
With “Down,” Hot Chip instantly grab you by the ears, blending elements of funk and disco into their well-worn electronica. As Taylor sings of “dreaming [his] life away,” the music video — directed by Douglas Hart and Steve Mackey — references Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, using distorted imagery to convey a sense of looming hysteria. Listen to “Down,” and see the artwork and tracklist for Freakout/Release, below.
Freakout/Release is the proper follow-up to Hot Chip’s 2019 album, A Bath Full of Ecstasy. Back in 2020, the band shared a 19-track Late Night Tales compilation album that included three new songs and a cover of The Velvet Underground’s “Candy Says.” You can also catch Hot Chip on their North American tour right now; get tickets over at Ticketmaster.
Freakout/Release Artwork:
Freakout/Release Tracklist:
01. Down
02. Eleanor
03. Freakout/Release
04. Broken
05. Not Alone
06. Hard to Be Funky (feat. Lou Hayter)
07. Time
08. Miss the Blues
09. The Evil That Men Do (feat. Cadence Weapon)
10. Guilty
11. Out of My Depth
