Obviously 2015 has been a big year for the band, but how has it been from your perspective?
Well I guess it has been tiring (laughs). This year has been fun. It’s been a long one, and we always knew it was going to be. We knew coming back after a longer break than we would normally – three years between albums rather than two or so – you do get a little bit out of practice. We’ve been doing other things; a lot of us have other projects. I’ve been doing New Build with Felix and Joe has been doing Two Bears, Alexis has a solo record – so it’s not like we aren’t doing stuff. But when you get back to the level that Hot Chip has been at this year you forget about that level of touring. It’s been really, really fun – we are very happy at the moment. We’ve still got quite a bit to go. I’d say we are about three quarters of the way through our booked in shows, so we are still very much in tour mode.

I’d love to know when the process for Why Make Sense? started. When did you decide to put down the side projects for this?
It sort of a difficult question to answer because the whole process is quite fluid really. It’s always the case that the later songs on the previous record are almost like the earliest songs on the next record. The album’s only ever really a snapshot of where you are at any one time. I think the song writing process for Joe and Alexis and for all of us is continuous.

There was a concentrated effort on this new record in the sense that we went away to a really nice residential studio in the UK just outside of Oxford and we had two quite intense writing and recording periods out there. One was early 2014 and one was later in the year. In between that time there were writing and recording sessions in different studios but those were the two most intense sections of getting the record together and it was really, really fun because we allowed ourselves time in the studio to experiment. A lot of people would go to the studio like that to just track the record, because it is expensive and you’ve got most of the record written and you simply record it there.

How did the process shape the sound this time around?
We left ourselves some space to experiment and do some jamming and playing and stuff like that, which is quite indulgent in retrospect but it was really fun to do and it was a different way of working for us. I think that came across in the record, I think the record is a little bit closer to capturing the feeling of what it is for Hot Chip to play live. That’s something that we’ve really wanted to move towards. I’m not sure if we are still quite there yet but it was a nice sort of attempt to do that.

You guys are hailed by the media as innovators in the electronic genre, six albums in how do you go about trying to push the boundaries further? Is it a conscious process or more of a gradual evolution thing?
Well first that’s very nice of you to say (laughs). It sort of depends on whether you are going to try and second guess what people want from the band or go ahead and do what you are going to do. We sometimes have fallen into that trap – the ‘innovative’ nature of it all – it can be a creative dead end in some ways because you find you find yourself constantly trying to be novel or whatever or do weird stuff for the stake of it. That can also be deadening in some ways. I think you have to react to whatever it is that is exciting you at the moment and whatever is creatively fertile for the group. We definitely have a collective attention deficit disorder in a sense – we find it hard to do one thing for any amount of time or start a song and have it be any one way and stay like that. As soon as something is sounding quite conventional we try and change it around.

Having said that, there are genre songs on this album – ‘Need You Now’ is like a house song and ‘Love Is The Future’ is a funk song of some kind. I think we don’t necessarily shy away from things being straight sometimes, which is hard to explain really but there is enough skill within the group that sometimes you can let a song be. It is a nice position to be in – I think sometimes we have been overly concerned with skewing things in weird space. And that’s just me. I think other people will still think it is quite weird; it’s very difficult to get into someone’s head and hear a song the way that they are hearing it. All we can do is talk about our little process.

When you put the songs together, is everyone quite eager to add their ideas to the pot or is there a battle of opinions over how a song should go?
Not really – a battle would make it sound more dramatic than it actually is (laughs). This record was probably more collaborative than any of the other ones. I think the last record, In Our Heads, had a really good working process between the group members. That was partly facilitated by our friend Mark Ralph who was engineering and mixing the record, who basically coproduced the new record with us. He has become a really good friend and he is really good at steering the session and it was very pleasing for me to get a few sections on the record. There is a section in Need You Now that is sung by me and it’s the first time on a Hot Chip record that there is a lead part that isn’t sung by Joe or Alexis – that was really nice for me, personally. With the rest of the record it was whoever wanted to take the lead at that particular time or if anyone had a particularly strong idea of how they wanted something to be. We usually give way to whoever is most excited about doing what they want to do because that tends to be the right thing to do creatively, I think. We are very lucky to have the relationship we have, it has become quite fraternal over the years. Brothers in the sense that brothers can still be quite vicious with each other sometimes but ultimately that you know it’s going to be fine like most familial relationships.

Moving forward to January, Hot Chip is coming to Australia to play at Sugar Mountain and a run of headline shows. What do you love most about performing in front of Australian audiences?
Well we are glad we could make it over in the first place. We tried to make it happen at various points this year and it just didn’t happen for various different reasons. The fact that this has come about was really pleasing for us because it’s a place that we enjoy touring very much. People seem to be very excited over there because a lot of acts don’t come through quite as often on the circuit as they would in Europe or America. We’ve been to America four times already this year and people are great over there, but that expectation means the crowds get a bit more excited. Also the food is really amazing, the weather is great – there isn’t much not to like about the country so we are very excited to be coming out.

By January you guys will be in a bit of a groove when it comes to playing live – is there anything that Hot Chip has planned for this tour that is new?
Well we have been doing this cover that people seem to be into. It’s a cover of ‘Dancing In The Dark’, which we just released. It just sorted started as this little thing and we starting morphing it into ‘All My Friends’ by LCD Soundsystem. Then we made a record out of it so now its really evolved out of the year’s worth of touring so by the time we get to Australia I think people will know that version and will be quite excited to hear it.

Are there any Australian artists that you have been digging recently?
Names that come to mind are all UK related, but we have one really good friend called Tornado Wallace – a disco house producer. His name comes to mind because I really enjoy his music and it will be good to see him, I suppose.

You’ve had the privilege of playing with Hot Chip, LCD Soundsystem and a bunch of other projects. What keeps you inspired to keep writing, recording and performing music?
That’s a huge question. It’s a weird one because I do sort of see this as my job and I have some level of responsibility to the rest of the people in the group. You trundle along and you go to the airports and travel and all that but we’ve had a few moments this year where a particular song is going really well and you get a great response from the audience and it creates a feeling that is irreplicable. It’s something that makes you feel so existentially good, it’s a very addictive experience. I think that really comes from playing with a group of people for a long time and having this depth of experience that goes back a long way, then being able to be captured by a momentary experience along that timeline is very hard to explain and very hard to give up. I think I will end up doing as my body holds out – that’s what keeps me going.

Hot Chip will be performing at The Tivoli on Wednesday January 27. Purchase tickets now through Ticketmaster.