For Hot Hot Heat, there's no better time than the steamy summer to turn the temperatue up in the studio. Now in the hands of Rich Costey (Muse, Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand) for the final stages of mixing and fine-tuning, their latest full-length is scheduled to be released in September on Sire. According to frontman Steve Bays, the British Columbians have tweaked their sound for their new release. This time, listeners can look forward to a grittier and more aggressive sound than the light-hearted and poppy hooks found on Elevator or Make Up The Breakdown. More than half of the new music was written on the road (a first for HHH) and Bays notes the influence of countless different locales. This is also the first record written with Luke Paquin, the guitarist who replaced Dante DeCaro after the recording of Elevator in 2004. "Every song on the record is different from the last, it's really all over the place," said Bays. "Overall, it's definitely a lot more epic sounding. It's got a lot of non-traditional arrangements and a lot of the songs start somewhere small and they take you somewhere completely different—really big and grandiose and decadent. It's a pretty big change." Co-produced by Butch Walker (Pink, Avril Lavigne, the Donnas) and the band, engineered by Stuart Sikes (White Stripes, Cat Power, Jets To Brazil) and mixed by the aforementioned Costey, the new album boasts a trio of industry vets who helped capture the bigger sound that Hot Hot Heat was searching for. "The first record was more of this new wave kind of disco thing, whereas this record is more alive. It's meant to be played live, big epic rock songs," said Bays. "We just started to think that our strength is in the songs, more than anything else, and in the live shows. So we just kind of combined songs that all four us agreed that we liked, combined with the kind of feeling that would translate well live. And we just recorded it really quick. I don't think anything else really mattered." All that's left for the new album is some finishing touches and a good title, something Bays has been pondering while roaming the streets of New York.
