A couple of months ago, London indie-pop trio Girl Ray released Prestige, the new album that they recorded with Animal Collective collaborator Ben H. Allen. Girl Ray started out making twee, lo-fi jams, but their sound has consistently grown more confident and dancefloor-ready over the years. Today, they’ve shared a track that they recorded while preparing to record Prestige, and it represents a kind of path-not-taken version of the LP.

Girl Ray recorded the song “Hurt So Bad” at the studio run by Hot Chip members Al Doyle and Joe Goddard, and you can definitely hear some of Hot Chip’s playful synth-bounce in the track. It’s a smooth, funky jam with Chic-style chicken-scratch guitars, vocoder-soaked backup vocals, and tons of vintage-synth bleeps and swooshes. On the track’s Bandcamp description, bandleader Poppy Hankin has this to say:

“Hurt So Bad” was written during the pandemic, when I was working on writing our third album and still deciding what the feel of it would be. Initially, I thought that a more electronic/house inspired sound would be a good fit for us, and with “Give Me Your Love” and “Hurt So Bad” demoed, we visited Al Doyle and Joe Goddard’s studio near Brick Lane to flesh them out. They were a great match for the songs, and we loved playing with their mountains of rare synths. Although our album ended up being more live, I think you can still hear the beginnings of our disco inspiration in this track.

Check it out below.

“Hurt So Bad” is out now on Moshi Moshi, and I would not be remotely upset if the next Girl Ray record sounded more like this.