Hot Chip
A Bath Full of Ecstasy
Release Date: Jun 21, 2019
Genre(s): Pop/Rock, Alternative/Indie Rock, Indie Electronic, Alternative Dance
Record label: Domino
Music Critic Score
How the Music Critic Score works
Buy A Bath Full of Ecstasy from Amazon
Album Review: A Bath Full of Ecstasy by Hot Chip
Great, Based on 11 Critics
Based on rating 8.5/10
It is a key mediator within a neurological reward system that allows humans to seek and reinforce pleasure. A Bath Full of Ecstasy, Hot Chip 's seventh studio album, aims directly for the brain's pleasure and reward systems, successfully stimulating heady rushes of dopamine-fuelled rapture. At its zenith, A Bath Full of Ecstasy contains some of the group's most memorable pop songwriting.
Based on rating 4/5
With a name like 'A Bath Full of Ecstasy', you'd be forgiven for thinking indie disco stalwarts Hot Chip were about to hook you up with more pills than The Shamen and take you down to the Haçienda. But Hot Chip have never been about the hedonistic '90s bacchanals. Though built for the dancefloor, there's always been a more introspective groove. The kind of sound that mixes the euphoric with the melancholic, rooted in the mind as much as in the body.
Based on rating 8/10
It seems that there are a lot of bands out there at the moment (The National, Spoon, Destroyer) who are a considerable number of years and releases into their career and yet to deliver an objectively poor record. With the release of their new studio album, A Bath Full of Ecstasy, this also continues to be the case in the career of Hot Chip. This is a band that have grown exponentially since the bare-bones indietronica of their debut record, through their best releases of 2010's One Life Stand and, in particular, 2012's masterfully-conceived In Our Heads, to now find themselves still at the business end of the industry after nearly two decades in the limelight.
Based on rating 4/5
Their strongest offering in years, where dance is an act of defiance Friends for 27 years, bandmates for 19, Alex Taylor and Joe Goddard officially formed Hot Chip in 2000, releasing a handful of EPs as a duo. Add in Al Doyle, Felix Martin and Owen Clarke a few years later and Hot Chip were born proper, the bulk of their best material coming between 2006's 'Boy From School' and 2010's 'One Life Stand.' Their dynamic performance at All Points East last month was certainly the mark of a band comfortable in their own skin. Tearing through a cover of Beastie Boys 'Sabotage', the audience euphorically bounced during one of the festivals most memorable moments.
Based on rating 8/10
Four years on from their last record, 2015's Why Make Sense?, Hot Chip have reconvened, bringing in outside producers to create A Bath Full of Ecstasy. The record is a pulsating collection of songs that at times embraces joy, yet also asks underlying questions about the significance of our experiences of love and loss. The insistence of "Spell," which draws from house, combined with lead singer Alexis Taylor's skilful pop melodies transforms the lyrics — "Now I feel your curse / It's all that I wanted / A memory in reverse / Forever I ….
Based on rating 4
Four years since their previous album Why Make Sense?, Joe Goddard, Alexis Taylor and the Hot Chip gang are back with a record that serves distinctive production and top grade sophisti-pop songcraft in equal measure. On A Bath Full Of Ecstasy the band have worked with external producers for the first time, in the forms of Philippe Zdar and Rodaidh McDonald, and the tracks are generally longer, favouring the odyssean structures of the 12" over the tightly measured radio version, and the balance of this record leans more towards up-tempo numbers. Spell impresses early on, with its vocoded hook and driving beat: it opens with a feeling of restriction, all muted chords and taut groove, and the hook-line's repetition works like a sort of incantation to bring in an explosive, euphoric chorus.
Based on rating 7.3/10
New Hot Chip songs always seem like spaceships: sleek, polished, unsubtle, a little ridiculous. These qualities make it easy to marvel at the work of the London group while also underestimating it. Hot Chip have been around for nearly 20 years now, and though they reached a peak about halfway through (their mid-career albums Made in the Dark and One Life Stand are hard to choose between), they've never entirely dropped off.
Based on rating 3.6/5
On Hot Chip's seventh album, the UK band explore a tug-of-war that will be familiar to many of us in this modern moment: one between engaging and escaping. They do this through contradictions. A Bath Full Of Ecstasy connects with political, economic and existential themes. "Escapism is the opposite of what we should be doing in our lives, for political and ecological reasons," Alexis Taylor, the band's lead singer, recently told The Guardian.
Based on rating 7/10
On A Bath Full of Ecstasy, Hot Chip respond to the oppressive feel of the late 2010s with songs that aren't overtly political, but emphasize how important compassion and empathy are during hard times. If there's any band suited to deliver this message, it's Hot Chip: On albums like One Life Stand, they excelled at making music that's equally intimate and capable of filling dance floors. Their wit and tenderness have only grown over the years, and there's plenty of both on A Bath Full of Ecstasy, which feels as informed by the bandmembers' time raising their families and collaborating with Katy Perry as it does by horrors such as the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox.
Opinion: Excellent
Across Hot Chip's journey from art-dance eccentricities to part of the furniture of the festival headlining establishment, the one act they've been compared to throughout has been Pet Shop Boys. It's easy to see why - both groups dealing in a high-energy synth pop tempered (transformed?) by the clipped melancholia of a vocalist who wouldn't normally do this kind of thing. On A Bath Full of Ecstasy, Hot Chip find an answer to the question that dogged Pet Shop Boys from 1988 onwards - what do you do once the imperial phase is over? One of the biggest shifts on A Bath Full of Ecstasy has been to bring in outside producers for the first time, in the form of Rodaidh McDonald (Sampha, The XX) and Philippe Zdar (Cassius, Motorbass).
Opinion: Excellent
While Britain's most consistent band may sound like they're voyaging through space on their seventh album, they're more interested in the energy travelling between humans on earth and the possibilities within. The result is their lushest sounding project yet. Just like the title suggests, it's a blissed-out collection of astral-like reveries where Hot Chip paint with broader, more vivid, strokes than ever before.
'A Bath Full of Ecstasy'
is available now