Are the Kaiser Chiefs Your New Favorite Tropical House Band?

Your boyfriend's fucking furious. He's incandescent with rage. He's been a disconcerting shade of purple for nearly a day now. He didn't sleep last night, and now he's on his sixth coffee of the day and he's shaking. He's thinking about taking up smoking again, so enraged and annoyed is he. "This," he's saying to no one in particular, to no one at all, "is a fucking disgrace." And what is it that's upset him so? What is is that's making him want to headbutt doors and punch windows? The answer is simple: the new Kaiser Chiefs single.

That's right, the last vestiges of landfill indie's syphilitic corpse has reduced your boyfriend to tears of frustration. "WHY," he demands to know, "WHY OH WHY HAVE THE KAISER CHIEFS RECORDED A TROPICAL HOUSE RECORD?" No answer is forthcoming. He's spewing frothy bile into the unknowing, uncaring, unlistening void, and his bleats will fester and rot until they come back around and choke him.

There's a tendency to get upset whenever an indie band decide to turn their hand at crafting a club classic. Ever since Andrew Weatherall and Bobby Gillespie necked a sack's worth of pingers way back when and recorded Screamadelica between bouts of telling anyone who'd listen how "fucking lovely" the Radio Times is, guitar toting lads have always looked for the approval of blokes who spend their nights in dank basements getting excited about hi-hat patterns. It's just the way of the world, and Ricky Wilson, Peanut and the rest of the Chiefs aren't any different.

"Parachute" is the Kaiser Chiefs trying their hand at Kygo and if you, or your boyfriend, can't appreciate that then I'm slightly baffled as to what is is you want out of music. I mean, obviously, "Parachute" is exactly as grim as you'd imagine a Kaiser Chiefs-doing-tropical-house track to be, but that's sort of the point. Or the charm, at least.

It's incredibly easy to be dismissive of "Parachutes" or Take That's track with Sigma, or whatever the fuck it was that happened when Leftfield got on the cans with Sleaford Mods, because they're the kind of records that—unwittingly, unintentionally—lend themselves pretty perfectly to having an elitist flag stuck in them. By that I mean that more often than not, a band turning their hand to club tracks usually results in something that'd never get played in an actual club and something the band probably won't ever bother playing out live. It's a loss-loss that results in even more loss—of both cool points and credibility. They want a bit of Paradise Garage's mystique, or Berghain's allure, but end up with something more akin to a fat lad puking into a urinal at 53 Degrees North in Warrington on a smart casual night.

And that's alright. That's OK. That's not the end of the world.

Why? Because "Parachutes" and records of that ilk—Coldplay's "Sky Full of Stars", Slaves' collaboration with Chase and Status, everything the Klaxons ever did—as ostensibly awful as they might be sonically, are actually a perfect means by which to (briefly) explore one of club culture's biggest problems. That problem is snobbery.

All too often we find ourselves patting each other on the back and bigging up the inclusiveness which is a pivotal part of club culture—whatever that means in 2016—while ignoring the fact that, largely, it's a pretty exclusive world. All of us, in our own individual petty ways, look down on others. I liked that label before you did! That DJ's shit now that everyone likes him! That Call Super song's been out for two months already! We (nearly unanimously) buy into the myth that obscurity and quality are perfect bedfellows. We're territorial, guarded, and almost terrified of the idea that our music might fall into the wrong hands.

"Parachute" is the sound of that happening. "Parachute"—which is a tropical house record by the Kaiser Chiefs for Christ's sake—is the sound of worlds colliding and you know what? It's not actually so bad, is it? OK, it's not like Ricky decided to fuck off spinning about on a chair on The Voice and gathered the lads into the studio to plod through a batch of Basement Boys classics, or a complete re-recording of More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art, and, alright, "Parachute" isn't 100% tropical house, but the point remains: for all we get performatively upset about the sanctity of dance music being trampled on by a rampaging Mark Owen, none of it fucking matters. The dance music you like, the Good Dance Music that Means Something, will keep getting made. The Good Clubs you like will (hopefully) keep their doors open. The minimal wave radio show on a university station beaming out of Bogota that you're locked into will keep broadcasting to the same six listeners for time immemorial. The world keeps turning, as it always has, as it always will.

As hard as it is for your boyfriend to believe, the world's perfectly capable of wiling away days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries on this cultural see-saw between the the Good and Virtuous, and the Bad and False. Anyone—you, your boyfriend, your boyfriend's awful fucking mate who has a podcast about dating mishaps—who grouses about "Parachute" is nothing more than an empty-headed fucking baby, and I hope they're doomed to an eternity in which the Kaiser Chiefs tropical house record is all they hear until their lonely death.

Josh is on Twitter