Hot Chip, Bernard Sumner and Hot City ''Didn't Know What Love Was''

I’m loving Hot Chip right now. In February, this very nerdy, London-based indie electropop quintet which formed around childhood friends Alexis Taylor (the skinny one with the glasses) and Joe Goddard (the chunky one with the beard), released their fifth full-length album One Life Stand.

It’s one of my favorite records of 2010, full of sweetly sincere love songs about marriage and family, only set to synthesizer sounds and blippity beats stolen from thirty-year-old records by Kraftwerk and Heaven 17. But Hot Chip’s latest single isn’t from the album. It’s a collaboration with New Order singer Bernard Sumner and London house music duo Hot City called “Didn’t Know What Love Was”; and it was commissioned by Converse (as in the shoes) who, like Levi’s Jeans, have been giving me plenty of reason to hang out at their website for reasons other than interest in their product. (Converse recently opened its own recording studio in Brooklyn!)

You can (and should) download – for free – the “maxi-single” of the song, featuring four different mixes, at Converse’s website. It’s a good old-fashioned Madchester house anthem that sounds like the proper follow-up to the 1990 hit “Getting Away With It” by Electronic, Sumner’s on-again-off-again collaboration with Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr. I keep expecting Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant to pipe in with the background vocals. And as if to prove this project was no cheap fling, an official music video for the single was released last week, and – well, it’s pretty wonderful. See it here: