Begins shipping the week of November 16, 2026.

As a longtime member of Hot Chip and LCD Soundsystem, Al Doyle has spent decades working alongside two of the most distinct vocalists in modern pop: Alexis Taylor and James Murphy. If he’s had a song or an idea, there’s always been someone else he’d rather have sing it.

But on November 20, 2026, the British multi-instrumentalist will release Hollywood Saviour, an album that drove him to finally embrace his own voice. “It’s me discovering a way to write and sing stuff that I could live with,” he says of his first-ever solo outing. “I hadn't really figured out a way to sing that didn't drive me insane. Being in bands with Alexis and James, I’m conscious that my voice isn’t the best instrument in the world. But I had to find some way of using it that made me happy.”

Recorded in his East London studio, Relax and Enjoy, Hollywood Saviour has the feeling—the rush and release—of a breakthrough, of an artist letting go. Doyle’s found freedom in simplicity here, leaning into the many pleasures of guitar-bass-drums, indulging wholeheartedly in the weird, spontaneous, raucous, and raw. He sounds free. “I wanted to be able to create something that somebody could put it on from start to finish and feel as though it takes you to a certain place and keeps you there,” he says. “The watchword was just to make things fun and exciting, and not worry about it too much. Things can be kind of stupid and basic, too.”

That sense of fun and rampant possibility can be felt in every groove, Doyle finding added inspiration in the loose and the louche—from Sexual Harassment’s 1983 electro-funk raunch-o-rama “I Need A Freak” to Throbbing Gristle’s locomotive 1980 paean to jerking off, “Something Came Over Me,” which is lovingly covered here. Working in his own studio allowed him the time (and comfort) to find his way naturally, building from freeform jams with friends and drum machines, stretching guitar and synth melodies until the song revealed itself. “It's a remarkable thing that happens, really,” he says. “If you just get somebody going for four or five minutes, they just sort of create a [song] structure without even thinking about it. There’s humanity in playing something for a little while, because you get a little bored, and you make a couple of changes, and then that becomes the thing. Rather than try to smooth them out, I was like, ‘Okay, let's see how far we can push this and keep those in without it feeling too strange.”

At times, this album feels like a delirious response to the darkness of our current moment. On opener “Hard Times in America,” Doyle offers us a psychedelic window into his experiences traveling back and forth to the United States in recent years, feeling fascism’s hold tighten with each visit. “There are different textures on the record—some things are more electronic, and some things are more band-y—but I think there's a kind of decay and dissatisfaction, and a kind of reveling in the misery of what's going on right now, while also trying to find a way through that, too,” he says. To strike that note, he took on the persona of “some guy who's making some bad decisions, but sort of allowing himself to do that and not beating himself up too much about it,” he adds. “And that is partly me and partly a kind of character that allowed me to write and get creative.”

That sense of character comes through in Doyle’s vocal approach, a giddy combination of Iggy Pop, Pete Shelley, and PIL-era John Lydon. On “All I Want for Christmas”—a dark and devastating highlight—he takes on the shape of a drug addict come holiday season, “both dead and alive,” abandoned by his family, stumbling through a garden of drum machine and piano. Amid the bouncy, burbling synths of “The Front Door,” he finds romance, drawing the clearest of scenes: a wave of anticipation, an opening door, a look of recognition and relief. It's a pop song, lovely and lovingly rendered. It just wouldn’t be the same without his voice.

“I can take this stuff and I can do something with it now,” he says of the creative possibility ahead of him. “I have this other angle to what I’m doing, this path I can go down that I didn’t have before,” he says. “That makes me really happy."

Side A
1. Hard Times In America
2. Diamonds Stars And Fires
3. Everything Myself
4. Passion Is A Crime
5. The Front Door

Side B
1. Pharoahs
2. Rent Free
3. Hollywood Saviour
4. Something Came Over Me
5. All I Want For Christmas

• Lacquers cut by Dietrich Schoenemann

• Pressed at Furnace Record Pressing in Alexandria, VA

• 140 gram black vinyl