Chick on Speed release new single ‘Synthesize’
Chicks on Speed
Release new single ‘Synthesize’
Career spanning boxset ‘HEARTopia’ out on 17th October via Grönland Records, featuring 37 tracks over 28 years
Includes brand new album ‘HEARandNOWtopia’
Photo credit: Wolf-Dieter Grabner
Chicks on Speed returned recently with news of a huge career-spanning box set that neatly threads together the singular and storied groups output across almost three decades. Nestled within the box set is a completely new album, ‘HEARandNOWtopia’, which shows that Chicks on Speed are far from finished. Today, they are sharing another track from it, ‘Synthesize’, which is full of pulsing basslines, glittering arpeggios and kitsch synthlines beneath politically charged lyrics.
Founding member Alex Murray-Leslie offers: “With Synthesize, Chicks on Speed remix Ursula von der Leyen’s European vision of the New Bauhaus “Let’s build together the beautiful, sustainable, inclusive living places of the future” through Francesca Albanese’s urgent global call for collective action to break the siege on Gaza, transforming together into a planetary strategy for degrowth, justice, and radical beauty – step by step, share and care.”
The 5LP box set ‘HEARTopia’ – released through Grönland Records on 17th October – features 37 Chicks on Speed tracks from their 28 years together, including the solid-gold classics ‘Euro Trash Girl’, ‘Kaltes Klares Wasser’, ‘Glamour Girl’, ‘Fashion Rules!’, ‘Art Rules!’, ‘We Don’t Play Guitars’ and ‘Uploading the Human’. The box set shows not just how many legendary songs Chicks on Speed have – you’ll be surprised how many you know – but illustrates how their anarchic spirit and generous, collaborative approach to making things happen has, over the course of three decades, helped inform contemporary ideas about performance, authenticity, queer-feminism, artistic entrepreneurship and art activism.
Their hyper-aesthetic, culturally critiquing new album – their sixth – is titled ‘HEARandNOWtopia’ and is part of the box set. Produced by Christopher Just, Gerhard Potuznik, Ramon Bauer, Melissa E. Logan, Unnur Andrea Einarsdóttir and Armageddon Turk.
All this activity comes as Chicks on Speed unveil their latest line-up: Alex Murray-Leslie joins long-time COS members of 25 years Kathi Glas, Tina Frank, and Anat Ben-David, alongside Sophia Efstathiou, Unnur Andrea Einarsdóttir, Kangela Tromokratisch, Alina Belyagina, Leslie Johnson, Tor-Ada Solberg, Mimmi Feuer, Roman Dziadkiewicz, Liz Dom, and UKRAiNATV the Krakow stream-art collective body; human x non-human mediators, transistors, and connectors between times and spaces, blending worlds, channels, streams, and dimensions with performers and pixels.
With this new line-up, Chicks on Speed become generative, post-genre, post-gender, post-patriarchal movement-part band, part art collective, part cultural virus. Think executive realness feminism colliding with anarcho-pop drag, where sonic experiments meet wearable tech, and every performance becomes a riot of radical possibility. From gallery to stage to screen, the new COS doesn’t just blur boundaries — they shred them, remix them, and hurl them back as high-voltage critiques wrapped in glam, wit, and noise. This is not a girl group. This is an intergalactic think tank in heels.
Melissa Logan, who started the whole thing with Alex in Munich, is no longer an active member of Chicks On Speed. She has this to say about the group: “To unpack the essence of Chicks on Speed is to imagine a box with endless compartments – each representing a distinct phase of the group‘s evolution and the limitless possibilities inherent in our collaborative practice. Rather than adhering to fixed roles within a singular industry or subculture, we operated as transitory agents, visitors moving fluidly across artistic, musical, and cultural domains. Our methodology is rooted in activation and provocation.”
