Chic releases new single, video ‘I’ll Be There’ after 20 years

More than 20 years after Chic’s last album, the titans of disco and forefathers of today’s dance music have a brand new single.

Billed as Chic featuring Nile Rodgers, the new song “Ill Be There” is a revival of an old sound while still sounding completely contemporary. It’s based on tracks Rodgers originally recorded with the group Sister Sledge and later revamped with the modern house music duo the Martinez Brothers.

“The outtake became a new song called ‘I’ll Be There,’ so named because when I discovered my band’s co-founder Bernard Edwards’ body a few hours after he’d passed away, I said, ‘Now, I can be there for you in death, the way you were there for me in life,’” Rodgers wrote on his website. “Back in the day ‘Nard always looked out for me. I was the reckless one. We had lots of fun and good times. So on the song’s surface it’s really happy. It’s about the origin of CHIC, and how dance music changed our lives forever.”

Rodgers’ fast, funky guitar strums and Chic’s bubbly disco underpinnings are given a new clarity and heft. This could play at a ‘70s roller rink, basement rave or the champagne-crackingest Vegas club and still sound on-point.

Chic’s career was given fresh blood after Rodgers’ work on Daft Punk’s “Random Access Memories,” and Rodgers seems to be making the most of it: a new album, “It’s About Time,” which he says is about time-traveling (more specifically, a conversation with Edwards “trying to explain that life has gone on and you woke up 20 years later and this is what the world is like”), is soon to follow.

The song also has a new retro-contemporary video, starring supermodel Karlle Kloss watching vintage Soul Train footage of Chic and taking it as a cue to go party. Watch it here, and get the single in your pre-party Spotify playlists here. Go out and get lucky, dance kids.

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