Hot Chip / Photo by Bevis Martin and Charlie Youle

If you want to see the workings of a band's collective brain in physical form, visit their studio. In the case of English electro-pop eccentrics Hot Chip, this mission takes you down a quiet North London side street to the bedroom of Joe Goddard. Even with just five band members and one journalist, the apartment feels cramped. The only place to sit is Goddard's unmade bed. Next to it stands a desk supporting a laptop, turntable, and blocky modular synthesizer, its red lights flickering like a console from some '60s sci-fi show. In the corner, there's a Yamaha keyboard framing some camping equipment. The floor is covered with sliding piles of vinyl, unsteady stacks of CDs, and boxes of tambourines, accordions, and peculiar percussion devices.

It looks like the home of an absentminded gadget freak who might release some music one day if he ever gets his head together, not the nerve center of one of the most garlanded upstart acts in Britain. But this small, cluttered room is where most of Hot Chip's new album, Made in the Dark, was conceived. You suspect that Goddard's fiancée is an admirably tolerant woman. "I don't tend to work in the evenings much anymore," he says with a wince.

"It was detrimental to his life," adds guitarist Al Doyle.

Nothing about Hot Chip fits. The way they look, sound, and work is a matter of disparate elements clicking into place at odd angles. With all their various influences and approaches, it's a wonder they ever manage to finish a record. The only two active bands that all five of them -- Goddard, Doyle, singer and keyboardist Alexis Taylor, guitarist and keyboardist Owen Clarke, and drum-machine programmer Felix Martin (all 27, except Goddard, who's 28) -- can enjoy as a group are Kraftwerk and a French techno duo called Nôze. "It's impossible to get five people to agree on everything," says Taylor.

Yet it works. Their second album, 2006's The Warning (released by tastemaking DFA in conjunction with Astralwerks), and its rampaging electroboogie hit "Over and Over" won over extrovert club kids and housebound indie snobs alike. Since then, they have remixed Kraftwerk, Gorillaz, CSS, and Amy Winehouse, and have been approached to work with both Kylie Minogue and Scritti Politti, which says a lot about the breadth of their appeal. "They do electronic music that has real soul," says Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie, who dabbles in soulful electronic music himself with the Postal Service. "It's not just about making beats or party anthems; they make songs that are really emotive and beautiful."

"We don't want to get bored," Taylor explains simply. "That's often at the forefront of our minds: What can we do that would be unexpected at this point?"

Studying their menus in a dimly lit, rundown Thai restaurant up the street, Goddard and Taylor are a mismatched pair. With his checked shirt and wild beard, Goddard could be a displaced member of Grandaddy, while Taylor is small and studious, with Coke-bottle glasses and a quiet, earnest voice. Speaking in hushed tones about his opportunity to remix his hero Robert Wyatt, he smiles wryly: "I don't sound very excited, but I am excited. It's just my monotone."