Hail to the Chiefs: Buzz Band Returns

A week after the Kaiser Chiefs released their third record, the Mark Ronson-produced Off With Their Heads, frontman Ricky Wilson is stomping on a new leather jacket in the artists' lounge at BBC Radio 1. The band is here to play four songs from the disc, which debuted on the U.K. charts at Number Two, behind AC/DC's Black Ice. But Wilson — a dandyish 30-year-old in a pinstriped suit — isn't wholly satisfied with his purchase. "It looks too new," he says, applying scuffed boot to pristine hide. "Ugh."

Wilson rolls the jacket into a ball and stuffs it into a white paper shopping bag. When he's called back to Studio 3 — part of a sprawling underground complex in a posh West London neighborhood — he finds his bandmates hanging out with Lily Allen. Allen, whom Ronson recruited to lend singsong-y backup vocals to the Off With Their Heads cut "Always Happens Like That," is attempting to re-create her part for the radio performance. "Do I have to harmonize?" she asks. "I can't remember how I sang it on the fucking record. Can't I just sing along?"

Nick Hodgson, the group's drummer and main songwriter, steps out from behind his kit to help her out. They try another take, but instead of harmonizing, she mirrors Wilson's lead. "I don't blame her," says Wilson. "If I went into a room full of women who had been playing music together for 10 years, I'd be fuckin' ruined." Hodgson orders the rest of the group — Wilson, bassist Simon Rix, keyboardist Nick "Peanut" Baines and guitarist Andrew "Whitey" White — to run through the tune again and again until he's happy with the results, and asks Allen to stick around and overdub her part.

That dedication to perfection is all over Off With Their Heads, a hooky blast that is one of the most entertaining rock records of the year. Ronson, a fan of the Chiefs since 2005's Employment, had never produced a rock album before, but his touch can be heard throughout the groovy, percussive Heads. The Chiefs met Ronson when he produced a Lily Allen cover of the Employment single "Oh My God" and brought them in to film a cameo in the video. He offered to work with the band after being blown away by its live shows — raucous affairs with Wilson high-kicking and crowd-surfing his way through sets. "I didn't tell them this because they probably would have been mortally offended, but they reminded me of [G n' R's] Slash and Duff," Ronson says. "That play between the guitar and bass is quite punky-thrashy, but very heavy at the same time. I was trying to bring that out in the album."

But the disc isn't all tightly wound rockers: On "Like It Too Much," strings swoop and glide above a staccato rock stomp, imbuing the tune with near-campy grandiosity. The arrangement is courtesy of David Arnold, a film composer who's worked on the past five James Bond movies. Like Ronson, he was blown away when he saw the band live. "Every song's got, like, three or four hooks in it," says Arnold. "It all seems familiar somehow, which is the art of a great pop song." For his part, Ronson was grateful just to be doing something outside his comfort zone. "There are only so many female solo artists you can produce," says Ronson, who's best known for producing Amy Winehouse's Back to Black. "I feel like it's time to not only branch out, but just change the scope of sound a bit."