Operating at the intersection between electronic music, indie rock and pop music, British five-piece Hot Chip have built their career on tracks that balance undeniable hooks with an alluring strangeness.
That sound comes from the band’s mix-and-match approach to songwriting, which combines synths and electronic instrumentation with guitars and acoustic drums, and sees band members regularly swapping roles in the studio and onstage.
But, as band members Al Doyle, Joe Goddard and Alexis Taylor explained to us when we visited them in their east London studio, in the band’s early days that approach often meant working around technical limitations.
“When we made our earlier albums, Joe was always trying to capture what was happening when everyone was playing, but it didn’t always work,” Doyle says. “We just didn’t have the setup to be able to do that. But the instinct was always there to try. Part of the reason for building this place originally was to make that whole process easy.”
Much of the band’s first few albums – Coming On Strong, The Warning and Made In The Dark – were started in Goddard’s home studio. Although to hear Goddard describe it, the word ‘studio’ might be overselling it a little.
“The computer and a small amount of gear was just next to my bed,” he says. “There was a kind of spaghetti of black cables all over the floor, which traumatised my wife and still does.”
In the years since, the band’s studio setup has been upgraded significantly. The band now primarily work out of a London studio primarily set up by Doyle. With multiple rooms, an envy-inducing collection of vintage synths and a Trident TSM desk at its centre, the studio allows the band to write tracks in a more collaborative manner.
“Because we’re in this studio that Al built, we have space to make things very readily from scratch,” Taylor says. “There may still be times where somebody brings an idea they’ve written in to play to the rest of the band, but there are also times with the new records we’ve been making where everything is just happening in real time. We’re improvising things, trying things out.
“You make a beat on a drum machine and then somebody joins in on the keyboard, and another person simultaneously joins in on another keyboard over the other side of the room. Kind of just building up layers to see what the song could become.”
As Doyle explains, allowing multiple people to try out ideas simultaneously is one of the key benefits to the design of the studio space.
“In terms of how Hot Chip operates in this studio, that’s why everything is basically plugged in all the time, because it means that there’s no barrier to capturing a performance that’s happening on any instrument in any space in here,” he says. “I think that came from that culture of trying to do that, even when we weren’t quite able to do it.”
“The room allows you to be working on one thing in here collectively, but then there’s also the drum room and the piano room through there,” Taylor continues. “Often I’ll run in there if I have a different idea for something. So you can kind of develop a second song while you’re working on the first song. There are different spaces to try things out, and for some reason I think that’s been quite key to the way we’ve always worked.
“Whether it’s going into a different room or just stopping what you’re doing and starting another thing, basically having a couple of things on the go in one day can mean that you have a breather from something. Then when you try a new idea, a second song, that could be quite exciting because you feel like you’re making progress on a different thing. It gives you the space to then come back to the first idea with a fresh perspective on it.”
We took the opportunity to quiz Hot Chip on a few of their studio highlights. In the video above, Doyle, Goddard and Taylor talk us through some of their favourite synths, and why the Trident desk brings a distinctive vibe to the studio.
The band has recently reissued breakthrough albums The Warning, Made In The Dark and One Life Stand. Revisit our breakdown of the band’s classic track Ready For The Floor.
