Alexis Taylor

Alexis Taylor first gained recognition as the clear-voiced frontman of Hot Chip, yet he has carved out a parallel path as a solo singer/songwriter whose introspective style takes fresh directions on every release. His first solo effort, Rubbed Out, surfaced in 2008 and shifted away from the band’s percolating electropop toward quieter, frequently acoustic material. Commitments to Hot Chip and his side project About Group occupied him until 2014, when he returned with Await Barbarians, another understated and contemplative set on which he performed every instrument aside from strings. For the 2016 album Piano he tracked a collection of new compositions and covers using only piano and voice at Hackney Road Studios alongside Shuta Shinoda. In 2017 a pair of related records followed: Listen with Piano, which mixed Taylor’s own songs with guest appearances by Green Gartside, Jennifer Herrema, Papa M, and Brian DeGraw, and Listen With(out) Piano, which presented the same collaborators’ contributions independently. On his fifth album, Beautiful Thing, Taylor enlisted an external producer for the first time—Tim Goldsworthy, the UNKLE member and Mo Wax co-founder—with the finished work arriving in April 2018.