Growing up should have been hard for Hot Chip. The British indie dance-popper group made its name on youthful playfulness, a lot of nerdy cool and an amazing skill at crafting earworm melodies. On 2007’s Made in the Dark, though, a bit of maturity showed up at the party without looking glaringly out of place. That maturity has taken full control on One Life Stand, and surprisingly, it’s resulted in the band’s best album yet.
Largely trading in the sugar-high dancefloor anthems, the album finds Hot Chip applying its ability to write whole songs with nothing but hooks to more restrained numbers about the joys of domestic adult life. The bass still pulses and the beats can still make heads bob, but One Life Stand is more for the dinner party than the club. In fact, the album only really stumbles during its most overtly dance-oriented moments, such as the jarring house beat on “We Have Love.”
Though Hot Chip is content to settle down a bit, its playfulness remains intact on songs like “Brothers,” the album’s most tender love song, which happens to be about, among other things, playing Xbox with your bros. It’s the type of moment that really sums up the album; Hot Chip has grown up, but it hasn’t gotten boring.
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