When Beyonce Wants One Of Your Songs, You Don't Say "No"

Chairlift have won influential fans in the likes of Beyonce and Solange Knowles. Still, while the quirky synth-pop combo have street cred, they don't mind being called "cheesy". Indeed, the New Yorkers recently joked on Twitter about a journo who asked them, "Are you afraid of your music ever becoming cheesy?" Duh.

But is frontwoman Caroline Polachek really so chill? "Well, I guess it depends on what your definition of 'cheesy' is," she says. "I think it's definitely sentimental. We don't practise a lot of restraint... I don't really take those labels to heart and, at the same time, I'm not particularly offended by people reading things as cheesy."

"Beyonce's an incredible curator. She has a really sharp ear."

Chairlift - its core Polachek and fellow producer/instrumentalist/'80s boffin Patrick Wimberly - broke out with Bruises, a song off 2008's debut Does You Inspire You that was licensed for an Apple ad. Four years later, they released Something - sanguinely ahead of a Laneway run. In January, Chairlift unleashed Moth - their poppiest, and most expansive album to date. This time they didn't purposely replicate genre tropes. "It was really just quite emotionally-driven," Polachek notes. Nevertheless, the single Ch-Ching (co-produced by Rhye's Robin Hannibal) has a flicker of Wimberly's beloved go-go. "We really just had our ears open and were kinda inspired by the energy and the melting pot of New York City." Chairlift have now ensured that Moth is the centrepiece of their live show - next stop Australia. "This record's definitely more uptempo and full-bodied than anything we've done before and it really is a huge pleasure to sing it on stage," Polachek enthuses.

Chairlift's members have ventured out - both now DJ. "I really like singing over DJ sets," Polachek says. The songstress has collaborated with such buzz acts as Blood Orange. In 2014 she presented a solo project, Arcadia, as Ramona Lisa on Terrible Records. Meanwhile, Wimberly has played drums for Terrible alumni Solange - and he was involved in A Seat At The Table. But the big 'OMG' moment came when Polachek contributed No Angel to Beyonce's self-titled album.

Today she reveals that No Angel originated as an early, experimental outtake from Arcadia. "Patrick and I went into the studio to write songs specifically for Beyonce - but precisely because they were written for her, with her in mind, she wasn't interested. I mean, Beyonce's an incredible curator. She has a really sharp ear - and then an incredible sense of combining things that no one would guess would work really well together. But I think she really wanted that self-titled record to be very different than anything she'd done before. We're obviously huge fans of her old work - and we may have imitated her previous sound too closely for her to be interested in [the songs]. She ended up taking a song that I had made on my own that I had just added to the folder before submitting it. So it was quite surreal because people were saying, like, 'Oh, Caroline is writing for pop artists right now,' but actually I had zero experience writing for pop artists. Zero!"