Chicks on Speed

Multinational electro-pop/multimedia collective

Live / DJ

Chicks on Speed - Announce career spanning boxset ‘HEARTopia’ out on 17th October via Grönland Records featuring 37 tracks over 28 years and including new album ‘HEARandNOWtopia’.

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.

“This box set is a celebration of the collaborators Melissa and I worked with with us as catalysts - it reflects on the power of collective action and radical experimentation as a form of artistic intelligence with transformative potential. It’s a commitment to this world: imagining it and changing it through art and social action as a mode of resistance and renewal against the planetary urgencies of our time” says Alex Murray-Leslie, who started Chicks on Speed at Munich Art Academy in 1997 with fellow art student Melissa E. Logan and fashion stylist Kiki Moorse.

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, its ten tracks appear across the box set and include the effervescent hi-NRG of new single ‘MEAT&Drag’ on which Chicks on Speed contextualise meat-replacement as drag. This single, and the future ones, have music videos directed by Liz Dom that they use as vehicles for cultural critique, activism and artistic research, addressing societal issues of justice, the climate and nature crises - and speaking up against the genocide in Palestine.

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, 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.”