“It’s way more than a coming of age narrative…it was so luminously modern, and on top of that, what’s so great about that body of work is that it works in so many registers at once…”

It’s 7pm in New York and Dave Macklovitch (AKA Dave 1) has spent the day working from home, which I imagine involves making his way through five straight hours of Funktronica guitar licks, a stuffed eggplant with a glass of Vouvray and a small plague of interviews — conducted in preparation for the release of Chromeo’s fourth studio album, White Women. Finally he’s been gently bullied into a jarring conversation with an Australian writer about French literature. He sounds slightly worn.

“You’ve got these parallel tones in Proust that are really fascinating…I guess a lot of that stuff in Proust really speaks to me. Again you know, it’s that high brow/low brow thing. That’s what’s become my modus operandi with Chromeo as well.”

Chromeo are a musical paradox that stretches all the way back to the highly-strung funk of their first big single ‘Needy Girl’, in 2003. Macklovitch’s voice yaws as we talk about the dualistic nature of Chromeo, slipping into the sort of brisk higher register reserved for deeply familiar subjects.

“We’re the only band that could have Benny Benassi and Mr. Oizo doing remixes on the same album” he enthuses. “We’re the only band that could have A$AP Ferg and SoKo in the same video.”

 

The defining feature of Chromeo over the last decade almost always takes the form of a question: how much of it is a joke? Are the shimmering layers of electric cheese, the neurotic romance and earnest resurrection of dormant novelty pop all just part of some serpentine, Kauffman-esque joke Chromeo are playing on us? Over the years, Chromeo have insisted ‘No’, and I actually believe them. When talking about the videos from Chromeo’s 2010’s album Business Casual, the genuine love for the music and aesthetic of Chromeo is palpable, even catching.

“We try to reinvent ourselves with every record. Like with Business Casual a lot of it was about the videos, the ‘Night by Night’ video, the ‘Hot Mess’ video – the one in the sauna. Those are classics you know, and that’s when we really honed our visual image.” This is where Chromeo are most interesting. They’re simultaneously keenly self-aware—conscious of how florid and playful their sound and aesthetic is—while being deadly serious in its execution.

“We’re hungry dude, and we’re humble. We really feel like we can always improve, so we push ourselves to create better music and try to be more relevant on every record.”

 

The very real sweat, tears and bonafide lovin’ that Chromeo pour into their silken oeuvre is almost certainly what has preserved them from the swift evaporation experienced by straightforward novelty acts. Chromeo aren’t the irony-drenched hipsters on the dancefloor taking the piss, they’re far more magnetic. They’re the guys who look like a bag of elbows, dancing like their life might depend on it—and after closer inspection, happen to have some fucking sweet moves. A large part of Chromeo’s captivating honesty is in the vulnerability of their lyrical content. Macklovitch has said in the past that he has a sort of “neurotic Jew take on the lover boy thing”, a perspective that isn’t pure invention.

“I think it’s a bit of both you know…you can face stuff through your persona that your biographical self will never admit. Like my biographical self is way too cool to admit that he’s jealous, but my persona wrote a song about it, it’s that duality…”

 

Another key reason (possibly the chief reason) for Chromeo’s enduring popularity is their unwillingness to become pure pastiche. Their sound leans heavily on saccharine electropop from the 80s, most definitively Hall and Oates, but they’ve always claimed to have stayed vigilantly away from becoming just another meticulous reproduction.

“That shit is boring dude” Macklovitch groans into the phone. “There has to be a dialogue between the present and past…It’s about taking things out of their original context and making your current context part of what you draw inspiration from. Look at a band like Haim. They take Fleetwood Mac and then mix it with Teen Vogue.” Macklovitch draws breath, finding his place in a string of thoughts he must, by now, be intensely intimate with. “And I think with Chromeo, when we do really nail it, it’s modern and old school at the same time.

But this “dialogue between the present and past” extends beyond Chromeo’s writing process.

The production, particularly on White Women is a very conscious grafting of new to old. New York based electro duo Oliver were enlisted to shed their gleaming, modern disco splendour over the mix. You can hear it.

“The guys from Oliver…mainly work on software…so I think that’s why we got the songs to sound a little bit more modern on this record” Macklovitch agrees, but the merging of digital and analogue technology is only a part of the sonic tension in Chromeo’s music.  There’s also the gear. While I trawled eerily through Google search results for “Chromeo Instruments” I found something of an urban myth emerging: That the basis of their programming and arrangement for writing is done in Cakewalk, on a PC from 1995 with Pentium 1. When I refer to this ancient piece of sentimental scrap as the technological “bedrock” for Chromeo, Macklovitch just laughs, but still agrees: “everything still starts on the 1995 Pentium”. But that’s just the beginning. Chromeo have an extensive menu of analogue synths—Moog Prophet, Roland Juno, Korg Monopoly ad many more—as well as drum sequencers the same age as themselves like the Roland CR-78. But they’re also using newly found synths like the Italian Elka Synthex, as well as running Ableton Live to power their live show and on White Women (thanks to Oliver) have actually started using software in the writing process (on computers from this Millenium).

 

The sonic tension between old and new is more active in White Women than any of their previous work. In the same way that Business casual was an extension of Fancy Footwork the album that Macklovitch claims “established [Chromeo’s] sound and style”, White Women is another level again.

“I wanna say we’re reupholstering or sprucing up the Chromeo sound. It’s got the 80s thing but there’s also more of a live feel on this record…[there’s] more live bass, more live guitar, more live keys than on anything else, but the sound is more modern…” And these aren’t the only new elements. Chromeo have taken a full four years to make White Women. The songs are insatiably catchy, the production is more lustrous than ever before and Macklovitch and I seem equally pleased with the result.

“It’s more ambitious musically, with the long songs that change halfway through…we felt like we could really nerd out and do all this fun stuff that we never had the chance to do before.” But it’s still Chromeo. It still captures every moment of unrequited love, of geeky triumph, of dancefloor incineration from every 80s teen movie you’ve ever (or never) seen. And as well as some new faces (like Chad from Toro y Moi and Ezra Koenig from Vampire Weekend) there’s familiar guest Solange, whose guest track “Lost on the Way Home” is every bit as smooth and beguiling as her previous guest vocal on “When the Night Falls” from Business Casual. Macklovitch is a fan.

“You gotta convince her to let me produce her entire album, I wanna do a whole Chromeo/Solange album…” he laughs.

2014 may be Chromeo’s year. After releasing four singles prior to the album and swaggering through a dramatic Coachella performance, Macklovitch seems ready. He no longer has to balance his duties at Chromeo with his PhD in French Literature and lecturing responsibilities at Barnard College, and has spent the last four years with collaborator Pat Gemeyal (P-Thugg) solemnly dedicated to making some of the most infectious and irreverent pop music of his career.

“We’d been gone a while,” he reasons quietly, “so I wanted to reintroduce us as a new band with a new kind of sound.”