Repetition

The career retrospective is something of a lost art in the streaming era. But the indietronica institution Hot Chip have tackled theirs with aplomb. True to form for a group that balances earnestness with a finely honed deadpan sensibility, Joy in Repetition encases a few emotional truths within a self-deprecating title. The main reference is the chorus of 2005’s “Over and Over,” the London quintet’s breakthrough single and defining hit. More broadly, the album title captures both the essence of dance music and Hot Chip’s penchant for borrowing: They nicked it from Prince.

To their credit, Hot Chip never hid their debts—they said they were down with Prince from the beginning. The band didn’t set out to be a dance-rock powerhouse that would remix the singles of half the Western world. “We didn’t have the production value to do a Destiny’s Child-style show,” singer Alexis Taylor said in 2016. “And yet, that was the music that was exciting to us. We weren’t referencing the tradition of New Order or Depeche Mode.” They were five young multi-instrumentalists who shared an interest in Black pop and indie rock, a combination that was quickly becoming the default for a generation of hipsters. Their 2004 debut, Coming on Strong, was as overloaded as the fake synth on the cover: soul balladry and back-porch picking, smooth sax solos and tiny-desk techno. It was shaggy and languid and intimate, like the Beta Band if they were into Angie Stone instead of the Stone Roses.

Coming on Strong is the only Hot Chip album not represented here, possibly because it received the deluxe-reissue treatment last year, or because its muted, bedroom-to-blogroll aesthetic—to say nothing of its crazy-ass white-boy lyricism—might slouch in the presence of sturdier company. (It’s spiritually represented by “Look at Where We Are,” a Rodney Jerkins-style ballad from 2012 that’s only R&B by process of elimination.) The press material describes this collection as “less a Best Of, more like a Best Loved”—their most popular live songs, in other words. (Only studio recordings are included: no live versions, and no remixes of their own songs or others’.)The phrasing suggests yet another, more cynical riff on the title: the complacent audience, craving more of the same.

But Hot Chip never fell into that trap, even as they became a pop commodity. Visiting his girlfriend in New York, Taylor happened to run into James Murphy and Jonathan Galkin of DFA Records; Hot Chip signed with DFA soon afterward. The move felt like a fait accompli at the time, and even though Taylor and Joe Goddard remained the band’s producers, 2006’s The Warning had the whiff of DFA’s astringent house style. Going forward, Hot Chip’s timbres were crisper, their mixes were fuller, the saxes now skronked. Soul signifiers took a backseat to gurning electro, a sound the band metabolized with startling ease.