Here’s What You Can Expect From Spoon’s ‘Hot Thoughts’

Right from the opening bars of Hot Thoughts, the lead single from Spoon’s upcoming ninth studio album of the same name, it’s impressively clear that Britt Daniel isn’t starved of a direction in which to take the evolution of his and drummer Jim Eno’s twenty year-strong band. A single, sustained chord played on what sounds like the world’s loneliest church organ ushers in Daniel’s hesitant voice that, for a brief moment, seems to suggest that perhaps we might be treated to a more conservative offering from the Texan rockers than we’re used to.
But it’s all a ruse. The impeccable production that underscores every Spoon album soon kicks into gear with bombastic hand claps layered over tightly shred guitar a-la Custard’s Ringo, and only then does it become clear that the restraint in Daniel’s voice is only so that it allows every other element of the song to come into the fold and ultimately deliver in spades. In what is as tight a pop song as most anything else he’s written, there are complex threads and ideas interwoven all throughout that, over multiple listens, boggle the mind as to how on earth he thought they would all work together.
And it’s that these ideas are new that reassure us that nine albums in, Spoon still manage never to tread old ground. This undoubtedly informs the consistency of their output, which is the defining characteristic of their two-decade career – a feat almost unparalleled among their peers. Take Paper Tiger from 2002’s Kill the Moonlight. There’s absolutely nothing to suggest that abrasively clapping sticks next to washed up and spat out drum samples that sound like cherry bombs being let off in a wind tunnel should work, but, held together by the melodic vocals, it remains quite possibly the greatest song Spoon has ever produced.
Second single Can I Sit Next To You carries percussive undertones similar to Hot Thoughts but doesn’t build so much as it does maintain a jagged rhythm that sees Daniel feverishly struggling to pull himself out of the depressive funk he’s found himself in. The spellbinding kicker comes in the chorus as the mix is swamped with strings lifted straight out of a majestic Bedouin-esque musical, proving once again that Daniel and Eno are all too aware of the fact that the evolution of their band stops the second their well of inspiration runs dry. They’ve come this far, though, and if these two tracks serve as a reliable indicator of what to expect from the rest of the album, that well will stay full to the brim for quite some time, yet.