Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor Surveys ‘Paris’ On New LP

Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor (photo: Alexandra Cabral).

Hot Chip frontman Alexis Taylor gets a lift from a wide range of guests on his new solo album, Paris in the Spring, which will arrive March 13 on Night Time Stories. They include Air’s Nicolas Godin, the Avalanches, Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside, Étienne de Crécy, Lola Kirke and Pale Blue’s Elizabeth Wight.

The track “Out of Phase” is out now and was greatly inspired by late filmmaker David Lynch. “There are daydreams full of dread sometimes — thankfully not all the time,” Taylor says. “The mind can be filled, or overloaded, and mystery can be misleading — or leading. And soon you are on a Lost Highway. This is the first song Oli Bayston and I made together, and was a much-needed tonic for carrying on with making this album. This process involved finding incredible musical partners and then sometimes losing them altogether, as life gets in the way — just as much as it was also about losing friends literally to death. But the new musical partners are to be celebrated as much as the death of friends is to be focused upon. Lola Kirke was the missing ingredient in this song. Her voice takes a lonely cowboy’s mystery into a modern duet of love, yearning and searching.”

As for the varied sound of Paris in the Spring, Taylor concedes, “sometimes an audience wants to be told, what is this? And I’m refusing to do that. You can find great things in music when you open up to real listening. No one needs to be told ‘what something is,’ otherwise, why would we be making something so straightforward? Be ready to be surprised, to find something new in music, and let the music resonate with you.”

Taylor will promote the new album with a handful of upcoming shows in the U.K. and Europe, as well as a May 10 appearance at Zebulon in Los Angeles. As for Hot Chip, whose last album was 2022’s Freakout/Release, the U.K. dance veterans have one-off shows on the books on Feb. 26 in Seattle and Feb. 27 in Portland, Or.