Hot Chip Announce Ninth Album 'A Long Way From Kansas' and Share 'Random Violence'

Hot Chip are coming back — and they are coming back heavier. The British electronic outfit announced their ninth studio album, A Long Way From Kansas, on Monday, setting a January 8, 2027 release date through Domino, according to mxdwn. It is the band's first full-length statement of new material since 2022's Freakout/Release, and by every account the group has shared so far, it is their rawest record yet: more distorted, more primal, and made in direct conversation with a world that kept getting harder to look at while they were writing it.

The title paraphrases The Wizard of Oz — a nod, as mxdwn notes, toward Dorothy, her dog Toto, and the sheer distance they had to travel to get back home and find some sense of normality. It is a fitting frame for a record about searching for belonging and stability in the middle of chaos, and frontman Alexis Taylor has not pretended the darkness around the sessions was incidental. In a statement carried by Consequence, Taylor said: "A Long Way From Kansas reflects the general sense that the world we live in — the world we were making our record in — is particularly harsh, discordant, violent and depressing," Taylor continued in the same statement: "Maybe none of that's new, and that doesn't mean that every song is talking about the world and politics and genocide, but it was an unavoidable backdrop while making the music."

A single written for a friend

The album arrives led by "Random Violence," shared alongside the announcement with a video directed by Jack Cole. The song is a tribute to Keith McIvor — JD Twitch of the Glasgow DJ duo Optimo — a DJ, curator and promoter who helped define Scottish club culture and who left a deep mark on Hot Chip long before they were peers. Bandmate Al Doyle, speaking in the band's announcement, described the effect McIvor had on the people he worked with and played for as one of "human connection" — Doyle's phrase, and one the band keeps returning to when they talk about the track.

Joe Goddard, whose voice opens the song before Taylor joins him, laid out exactly where the words came from in remarks shared by the band: "Last year in September our old friend and brilliant DJ Keith McIvor of Optimo in Glasgow passed away after a diagnosis of an inoperable brain tumour a few months earlier," Goddard said. "He largely inspired the words of the song. He was a passionate music lover and a staunch believer in socialism. Many of the words relate directly to his death and to memories of being in Sub Club in Glasgow where we met 20 years ago." In the song's own lyrics — quoted in the band's announcement materials — Goddard sings of "a man who spent his life sending songs out into the world," before Taylor answers: "You gave me something to believe in."

The video makes the tribute communal rather than private. Directed by Jack Cole, it features Boss Morris, the all-female progressive morris dancing group, in what Consequence describes as a celebration of remembrance and resistance inspired by Optimo's legendary Halloween parties at Glasgow's Sub Club — the same room where Goddard first met McIvor two decades ago. The band will return to that room this week: according to The Needle Drop, Hot Chip will play a DJ set in McIvor's honor at Sub Club on October 21, a homecoming in the truest sense before the album campaign properly begins.

Made at home, guests included

A Long Way From Kansas was recorded at Relax and Enjoy, the East London studio run by Goddard and Doyle, per Consequence — the band's own space, which may help explain the looseness early listeners are hearing in the new material. Across 11 tracks, the album brings in two guests: Beth Ditto appears on "Me In Your Head," and Eddie Chacon features on "The Garden." The full tracklist runs "Stuck Around," "Waiting Around," "Random Violence," "The Mask Is Slipping," "Splinter," "Shortcut To Love," "Me In Your Head," "Hook Me Up," "Secular Hymns," "The Garden" and the closing "Crushing."

The announcement caps a quietly busy year for a band that has never really stopped. Earlier this year, Hot Chip turned up in the second season of Netflix's Beef, per mxdwn — a crossover moment for a group whose music has always lived comfortably between the dancefloor and the emotional gut-punch. Their catalog runs from 2006's The Warning and its indestructible single "Over and Over," through 2012's In Our Heads and 2019's A Bath Full of Ecstasy, to Freakout/Release and last year's first greatest-hits collection, Joy in Repetition. Twenty-six years after forming in London, the core lineup — Taylor, Goddard, Owen Clarke, Doyle and Felix Martin — remains intact, which is its own kind of statement in electronic music.

"He largely inspired the words of the song. He was a passionate music lover and a staunch believer in socialism." — Joe Goddard, on Keith McIvor

What happens next

A European tour is set to follow through February and March, according to The Needle Drop, with the album landing in the middle of winter — January 8 — rather than in the usual spring crush. That timing feels deliberate: this is a record about distance from home, grief carried in public, and the stubborn decision to keep dancing anyway, released at the darkest point of the year. If "Random Violence" is the tone-setter the band intends, A Long Way From Kansas will not be Hot Chip retreating from the world. It will be five old friends answering it — loudly, together, and in honor of the DJ who taught a generation of Glasgow dancers, and this band among them, what a room full of people moving as one can mean.

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