A Bath Full of Ecstasy

For all its glimmering synths and the robotic pathos of Taylor’s idiosyncratic vocals, this is a record with both heart and soul.

Their ingenuity and introspection often serves as an antidote to brash, factory-made pop, making them crucial figures within the wider pop landscape. On A Bath Full of Ecstasy, Hot Chip remain as vital as ever.

Maybe it takes a band of Hot Chip’s experience and sonic skill to have both pain and love that are as hard-won and effecting as it is on A Bath Full of Ecstasy; expanding their palette or not, big stars or not, it’s a joy to have them back.

The sonic backdrop is richer, more luscious and colourful, whilst rhythms that once would twitch are now more confident and loose.

Their more collaborative process has brought an album that, while rarely deviating from that Hot Chip sound, feels lighter and freer. Like a band finally feeling confident in their own skin, inviting us to find escape from whatever troubles us in their music.

They have been put on this planet to create beautiful, awe-inspiring packages of synth pop and alternative dance, a charge that A Bath Full of Ecstasy more than delivers on.

Amidst all the experimentation and extremes of this impressive album is a message about life: bathing in the moments of ecstasy will ultimately enable us to cherish and value life more.

Hot Chip have always made songs that slip between the erotic and and neurotic, but this time out there’s another level, as the tracks slip sideways to comment on our upside down world. From the gospel preaching about peace on the opener, “Melody of Love,” to the dark images of dancing in circles “like we’re dead” in the closer, “No God,” these songs combine difficult thoughts and easy pleasures. Complicated music for strange days and nights.

In the end, the few weaknesses of A Bathfull of Ecstasy--particularly the decision by the band to frontload all the strongest tracks--prove to be minor hitches in what is otherwise a characteristically superb song collection.

The band consistently reward close listening with little treasures, like on Echo, where a deceptively barebones instrumental is coloured with keys that decay slightly differently every few seconds, and bass that uses flourishes so understated they’re basically subconscious. That’s to say nothing of the songwriting, which is as catchy and uncool as ever.

A Bath Full of Ecstasy provides hope within strife, encourages repeated listens as much for their danceability as the quality of the writing.

A Bath Full Of Ecstasy might be a somewhat eccentric name, but it ultimately does sum the album up rather well (assuming it means the abstract emotion rather than literal pills stacked up in a bathtub): a lush, adventurous experience, immersive and refreshing.

Hot Chip remain ruthlessly consistent and relentlessly reliable. [Jul 2019, p.86]

A Bath Full of Ecstasy feels like a glorious concentration of Hot Chip's skills. [Summer 2019, p.111]

The result is their lushest sounding project yet.

For the most part, it’s compulsively listenable, oddly moving, and stranger than it first appears, as the band gets existential on the dance floor.

Tracks like "Hungry Child" and "No God" are huge, highly focussed anthems that would boss a festival stage. For all of the album's welcome contradictions, however, this focus does hold it back a little. ... But at the right time, in the right company or on the right dance floor, it's a powerful high that also has a message.

Immersive, joyous, but sometimes insubstantial, A Bath Full of Ecstasy lives up to its name in more ways than one. Even if it's not as consistent as some of Hot Chip's other albums, it's still a welcome, well-intended, and timely respite from the world at its worst.