Chairlift: "Ch-Ching"

Imagine Patrick Wimberly’s surprise: It is the spring of 2013 and he is getting a tour of the private collection at MoMA. At the museum’s annual, sparkling Armory Party, Wimberly is assisting his friend and occasional bandmate, Solange. Her big sister Beyoncé is there. And among the Picassos, Bey is like, “I love Chairlift. I would love to get in the studio.” That’s that city-of-giants New York magic in movies and dreams—Chairlift would make much more plausible city ambassadors than anyone on the radio—and it altered the scale of their band’s universe: Wimberly and his Chairlift partner Caroline Polachek spent one week in a Manhattan studio with a superheroine. They put a track in the mix: “No Angel”, an addictive, slinky, trouble-girl trap anthem Polachek made on her laptop on tour. “I thought it could be a good album track for Chairlift,” she said, “but it would be incredibly sexy if Beyoncé did it.”

Could you really come out of Beyoncé and not be utterly changed? It seems to have offered a champagne baptism for Polachek and Wimberly. “This record was very much about the experience of living in New York,” Polachek told Zane Lowe. “‘Ch-Ching’ is sort of about that feeling of getting lucky and not realizing what just hit you, and rolling with it.” The sly beats, brassy flourishes, and double-dutch rhythms render “Ch-Ching” unrecognizable from the quirky sync-core that began Chairlift’s ascension. Its dark textures and shattering core make it entirely of Beyoncé‘s radical spirit; it would be no surprise if they wrote this elegant banger during those sessions. In any case, it is inspiring to witness the metamorphose of Chairlift on “Ch-Ching”—something you have to imagine only comes after such proximity to god.

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