Hot Chip Freakout/Release Review: A More Disjointed Than Dynamic Emotional Ride

A potent sense of artistic and existential dissatisfaction permeates the synth-pop band’s eighth album.

Hot Chip, Freakout/Release
Photo: Matilda Hill-Jenkins

Hot Chip’s music has always been relentlessly upbeat and often platitudinous, with an undercurrent of wistful reflection. That wistfulness, though, bubbles to the surface on the British synth-pop band’s eighth album, Freakout/Release, as a potent sense of artistic and existential dissatisfaction permeates the album.

On the title track, Alexis Taylor reminisces about a time when “music used to be in love…used to be an escape” and admits to “losing [his] taste for this feeling.” The song melds rock and electronic elements in typical Hot Chip fashion, but its angular guitars never quite congeal with the expected mélange of synth sounds, mirroring the disconnect that Taylor is expressing but also, like much of the album, proving elusive in its impact.

The quintet’s quest to get their groove back continues on “Hard to be Funky,” a playful, self-aware cut—“It’s hard to be funky/When you’re not feeling sexy”—that’s perhaps the most successful attempt on Freakout/Release to transmit their feelings of dislocation and disenchantment into a meta jam. “Miss the Bliss,” on which Joe Goddard pines for the misplaced ecstasy of “when the feeling hits,” is thematically redundant by the time it arrives three quarters of the way through, but its forlorn yet driving melody is still resonant.

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Hot Chip consistently allow themselves moments of reverie on Freakout/Release. The album starts off with the firecracker rumble of “Down,” which turns on an obscure but well-chosen sample of Universal Togetherness Band’s 2014 track “More Than Enough” and to which bassist Owen Clarke adds a sinewy funk guitar lick. Later, things pick up even steam on “Time,” which uses its four-on-the-floor stomp to ruminate on the passage of, you guessed it, time itself.

But the album lacks obvious standouts like “Boy from School,” from 2006’s The Warning, and “Hand Me Down Your Love,” from 2010’s One Life Stand, both of which fuse borderline-cheeseball sentiments with gorgeously layered parts. The band’s tendencies to go through tonal permutations throughout the not-unaptly titled Freakout/Release often feels more disjointed than it does dynamic. Ultimately, neither their desire to create irresistible dance numbers nor their expressions of disenchantment are ever allowed to fully take shape.

Score: 
 Label: Domino  Release Date: August 19, 2022  Buy: Amazon

Charles Lyons-Burt

Charles Lyons-Burt covers the government contracting industry by day and culture by night. His writing has also appeared in Spectrum Culture, In Review Online, and Battleship Pretension.

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