Klaxons have never made it easy for themselves. Since the trio invented the short-lived new-rave scene for a laugh and released their debut album in 2006, they've embarked on many a ridiculous endeavour. Factor in a trip to the Amazon to take a face full of psychedelic drugs to "find inspiration", or wearing hooded capes without irony, and it's no wonder they're derided as dicks in DayGlo.
All this makes it easy to forget that they've achieved an awful lot. There was the time they won the Mercury prize for Myths of the Near Future (2007) and they performed with Rihanna at the Brits. Both of their albums made the top 10, they opened Blur's comeback shows and one of them even managed to marry Keira Knightley.
This night, however, there's no flashy comeback show. Instead, they're showcasing their forthcoming album, Love Frequency, in a small club space in east London and bringing their music back to where it always made sense the best: on the dance floor.
"What could make us happier than playing in our spiritual home?" shouts bassist/vocalist Jamie Reynolds, resplendent in a bronze jacket, before rave sirens signal the start of Atlantis to Interzone. Alongside similarly suited guitarist Simon Taylor-Davis and synth player James Righton, they look like they're a cruise-ship band from 2035. Actually, they're just game for a laugh, and it's irresistibly enjoyable.
Love Frequency may sound like a Goan trance CD, but its new material leads Klaxons in a house-inspired direction and, coupled with their signature ball-snipping falsetto, it suits them. They chirrup through their latest single, There Is No Other Time, a flippant, if not straightforward, 4x4 ballad, which – if you look past the trite dance tropes about "feeling the forces" and "letting go" – is quite fun. Echoes, meanwhile, their most conventional indie anthem to date, is pummelled by full-throttle cosmic disco from another new track, Rhythm of Life.
Better still are the new more experimental tracks, including the prog monster Children of the Sun, produced by Tom Rowlands. Live, its riffs are as powerful as any on the new Arctic Monkeys record, and played so punishingly loud that it wobbles the whiskers on your face. Worked into their oddball collection of acid-fried electro-rock and dreamy rave, they've forged a peculiar new brand of electronic pomp.
As they end with a cover of Grace's house classic It's Not Over Yet, Reynolds's parting shot, "This next one goes out to the future", is as much a cheeky nod at the swathe of piano house currently straddling the charts as a defiant signpost for where the band are heading.
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