Finger on the button

The Chemical Brothers are back with a new album - and back on form. Tom Rowlands talks to Jim Carroll about thinking outside the clubland box and how dance music has seeped into the mainstream

You could say that nothing has changed as a new Chemical Brothers album reaches the starting blocks. After all, Push the Button features a host of beats, breaks and grooves which show Tom Rowlands's and Ed Simons's debt, once again, to block-rocking clubland nights out, hip-hop's rich tapestry and the endless search for the ultimate sound. There are collaborations aplenty, there's a big banger of a single and there's a snappy title.

So far, so familiar. Yet the fifth album from the Chemical Brothers is everything its 2002 predecessor, Come With Us, was not. The creeping ennui that haunted that record is nowhere to be found. The over-riding reliance on a formula which dogged Come With Us has been ditched out the nearest window. The energy and verve that took a rain check last time out is evident in every hook, nook and cranny of the new album.

As far as the amenable Rowlands is concerned, the biggest change happened when he moved out of London before they started recording this album. For the previous eight years, he and Simons would go to their studio and clock in for work. "We'd sit in the same room every day, we'd do the same things and there was a routine to how we worked. The studio turned into a kind of day-centre for producers."

Because they were friends, they tacitly sought ways to avoid rows or disagreements. There was, Rowlands can now see, "a fear of change", something which was overcome when he left town. "Now we only get together when we have ideas or something to work on. Ed comes down to see me. So how we've worked has changed and has fed into how the music sounds."

From the opening Galvanize, with Q-Tip rapping over powerful Eastern-style strings, to Close Your Eyes, where newcomers The Magic Numbers apply some blissed-out vocal glitter, and Believe, with Bloc Party's Kele Okereke putting in the funk, the music really does sound different. Bigger in some ways, brasher in many ways and better in lots of ways, Push the Button is also crucially, Rowlands points out, a much simpler album than anything they have done previously.

"Instead of having 10 ideas, we preferred to have two ideas that were the right ideas," he says. "Sometimes in the studio, it's very easy to put another thing in and then another thing in and before you know it, what started out as a simple track turns into something very complicated and messy with all these average bits. To stay in the studio to find the simple idea that works is often the most difficult thing of all to do."

Rowlands can now see that their choice of collaborators this time around had a huge bearing on the album's sound. Instead of ringing up superstar mates such as Bernard Sumner, Noel Gallagher or Richard Ashcroft, their choice was for new acts who had not already developed a studio technique or, indeed, any bad habits.

"The Magic Numbers hadn't even released a record; we just saw them live. We'd heard nothing but good things about Bloc Party, and with Tresspasser Williams, we heard them late at night on the radio and heard this voice which made us prick up our ears.

"Before, we wouldn't go into the studio with someone unless we had an idea how it would turn out. This time, we chose to experiment with people who didn't have a history. You weren't sure if it would work out, so it was fresh and it felt good. At the end, we were shocked by what we'd done." He pauses and then corrects himself. "Happily shocked".

Others will probably be shocked too, but for different reasons. The club world, which gave Rowlands and Simons the impetus to start recording in the first place, is no longer viewed as the all-conquering beast it once was. Any number of "clubland in crisis" scares would lead you to believe that creativity and excitement have long abandoned the dancefloor in search of pastures new. Yet, as Rowlands points out, there have never been more bands making music who are so blatantly club-influenced. "Bands like Franz Ferdinand and The Killers have grown up with dance music and it's totally natural for them to make rock records which have been influenced by electronic music," he says.

"The influence of dance music is ingrained now, it's totally natural. It's not like they're bringing in some DJ to bolt on this dance music thing like you had in the early 1990s. It's part of how they approach making or even listening to records.

"Dance music now has been totally assimilated, so it's no longer seen as part of the underground. People are far more open now to different types of music and there are no longer these big divides between, say, rock and electronic music that you used to get. When I was a student in Manchester, there were very strict divides between kids who'd go to see The Fall and kids who'd go to the Hacienda. But Ed and me were people who'd go to both and we were seen as unusual. Now, people and especially bands approach music differently."

For the Chemicals, clubland continues to exert the same influence as always: one of many inspirations, but certainly not the only one. "We never made records to fit into a certain idea of what dance music was," Rowlands points out. "We wanted to make records that stood out. When we were going to clubs first, we thought the music was stale and uninspiring and was not doing all these things we wanted it to do. So we went off and made the record we thought did all of those things.

"It was always about making something which was not a generic record and not something that a DJ could seamlessly put into their set. It was about making records that stopped the night and made something happen. When you hear people in dance-music circles complaining about how they can't get the good records they used to get, it means it's a brilliant time to be making records. If you make a good record, it will stand out."

There's a similar challenge for the Chemical Brothers, especially after four commercially successful albums. For them, making good records has become "about searching for sounds and interesting productions and details which will surprise you". It's why he feels they have more in common with bands such as The Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev (past Chemical collaborators) and The Secret Machines (who will be touring with the duo in March). "They're pursuing a sound and constantly pushing a new agenda and that's something I think we subscribe more and more to." But, when the album promotion cycle eventually ends and the last show in the next tour has been played, the pair will return home to dream it all up again with no-one else looking on. That, says Rowlands, remains the greatest challenge.

"If you can't entertain yourself with your record, it would be difficult to imagine anyone else enjoying it," he says. "The hardest thing to do in music is to make records you want to listen to yourself and that's the challenge every time, to make a record which interests us and excites us."

Push the Button is released on Virgin Records today. The Chemical Brothers play The Point, Dublin on March 16th.