A Long Way From Kansas

A Long Way From Kansas, Hot Chip’s new album, finds them at their most primal. Paraphrasing The Wizard of Oz, the title is a nod towards Dorothy, her dog and the distance they needed to travel to get back home and find some sense of normality. The world seems to be spinning faster, its story harder to read. Deaths, wars for no reason, the climate catastrophe burning through the seasons. Reactive to all that bleakness, and echoing it with distortion and decay, the band’s ninth album finds its own way to celebrate life even as the edges all around it burn.

A beaming signal arriving just in time to remind the listener that no matter how bad the outside world is, there’s no place like home, whether that’s surrounded by like-minded souls on the dancefloor or closing the curtains in your own living room.