U Is For Utopia

Between creating an electronic stiletto shoe guitar, weaving theremin tapestries and exhibiting all over the globe, the wonderful ladies behind Chicks On Speed have found the time to release yet another studio album that features a stellar cast. “It's been about two and a half years,” Murray-Leslie reflects. “[The album] is from a perspective of how there have been many utopian ideas, many failed utopias; we're asking a lot of questions with our use of the word 'utopia'.”

The album is a beatsy, colourful amalgamation of music, fashion and art, high in energy and opinion, with the title track no exception.

“On the song Utopia, we have a guest, Yoko Ono, because she was a big player in that concept of utopia with John Lennon. It's also looking at Russian utopias of space, to art performance utopias, to what is the notion of utopia today. Do we need a utopia? Yes we do, because utopias open the mind, the vision and where we want to go. Maybe we don't go there but maybe we go somewhere else that's better.”

Another guest collaborator is one Julian Assange. “We made the song, God, with Julian; we went to visit him in the Ecuadorian Embassy. That was wild. It was very abstract. It was amazing to meet him and it was a real life-changing experience but it was very sad to go in there and have this really great exchange of ideas and just have to say 'OK, we're going now, bye.' It's not like, 'Oh, do you want to go out for a drink?' because he can't go out there. It's just really wrong. He's too ahead of his time and I think people don't really understand him and the Australian government should be supporting him and get him out, obviously.”

The album traverses countless themes, birthing powerful notions within the trio's fun and fascinating electropop concoctions, the track, Art Dump adding another element of conceptualism.

“There's a bit of a story behind Art Dump actually. It's a dream of Francesca Von Habsburg. Francesca said, 'I had this dream about an art dump', because there's this whole discourse going on in the art world at the moment, you know, that we shouldn't create objects anymore because its cluttering up the world and we're just creating more and more waste, the museums and the collectors can't handle it and so all of this really bad art should be buried somewhere in this huge art dump in the back of Munich somewhere and she had this dream and she told us about this dream and we were like 'This is great, this is a song!' Art Dump is pretty much a bit of a critique also about market art and that people are creating art for the market. We're real supporters of non-market art, that you make art not just to sell art but you make it for a more social outcome – so that's our critique of the art market there.”