“We’re not archived – we’re amplified! & multiplied!”  

“HEARTopia & HEARandNOWTopia are more than an album and box set, it’s an invitation. An invitation to collaborate, question, make noise, and make change. As a collective, we believe everyone can be an artist” 

Pioneering transversal art-pop collective Chicks on Speed are delighted to announce three new projects happening this year. There’s a brand-new album, a career-spanning box set, and a major solo exhibition at the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich.  

The 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 5LP 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. Inspired by Munich nightlife – in particular the fabled Ultraschall club, where Alex worked the door – the first incarnation of Chicks on Speed was empowered by the likes of Miss Kittin, Electric Indigo, Gudrun Gut and Underground Resistance.   

“Indigo would rock up with her girl gang to the do the club night Female Pressure,” says Alex. ”That was massive – she would do a huge takeover of the club with all girl DJs. Seeing and hearing all this was so empowering as a young art student – I wanted to be part of it!”  

Picked up early on by the likes of The Face, NME, Diane Pernet´s A Shaded View on Fashion and Financial Times, Chicks on Speed became the unstoppable art-school project that ate the world – a mad collage of ideas and influences and energy that to this day thrives on spontaneity, suspension, confusion and provocation but ultimately has a very human heart and a sense of purpose.   

A cultural movement in itself – one that came to be defined by their groundbreaking Girl Monster project featuring 64 transgenerational women bands in the late noughties – for most of this century Chicks on Speed have embraced faux pas as strategy, ignored gatekeepers by slipping through the back door, smashed glass ceilings, upended clichés and opened up the avant-garde (declaring everyone can be an artist and join a collective), all while having as much fun as possible on stages across the world in clubs and galleries and at festivals, exhibitions and political demonstrations.  

Chicks on Speed’s musical collaborators have included the likes of Julian Assange, ORLAN, Armageddon Turk, Peaches, DJ Hell, DMX Krew, Mika Vainio, Cristian Vogel, and Kreidler, through to a core squad of producers who’ve worked with the Chicks on most of their genre-bending COSmopolitan pop over the past 28 years; Viennese whirls Gerhard Potuznik, Ramon Bauer and Christopher Just, and the German duo of Thies Mynther and Tobi Neumann plus their newly appointed Icelandic producer Unnur Andrea Einarsdóttir. Long-time collaborator Walter Schonauer has created the box set with Alex and Melissa and overseen the design of the full-colour booklet and sleeve text featuring artistic cover/art contributions by Tina Frank, Douglas Gordon, Jo Zayner, Sophia Efstathiou, Alia Mascia (aka Xerox.ed), Annett Busch, A.L. Steiner, Jet and Giulia Timis plus a scarf by artist Leslie Johnson.  

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 ‘MEAT&Drag’, ‘Synthesize’ and ‘Cookies’, tracks which variously explore topics such as meat-replacement as drag, monitoring of the internet, degrowth and circular aesthetics. There´s also an ‘IDEOBICS WARM UP’, by Greek philosopher Sophia Efstathiou; a series of mindbody exercises inspired by Jane Fonda and “1970´s Think Possitive Louise Hay”. The songs and their upcoming music videos (directed by Liz Dom) are importantly vehicles for cultural critique, activism and artistic research, addressing societal issues of justice and the climate and nature crises - speaking up against the genocide in Palestine. 

But Chicks on Speed operate outside music too: as a collective, they work across academia, image-making, critical fashionable costume, musical instrument design, craft, teaching in art schools, artistic research, and hybrid streamart performances — part Dionysian Greek theatre, part Queer feminist drag ensemble. In this all-encompassing spirit, they are taking over Munich’s venerable Museum Villa Stuck for HEAR&NOWtopia, a futurospective audiovisual extravaganza curated by Xabier Arakistain and assembled by Chicks on Speed alongside 50 collaborators from across their 28-year history. The song's lyrics greet visitors like a manifesto, as suggested by Arakis, who has collaborated with the group since 2001.  

“What has always moved me about Chicks on Speed is their bold and sincere talent,” says Arakis. “Their voice is never fake. They’ve drawn from radical 20th-century art movements like Dada, Fluxus, Situationism, and Feminism, and fused them into a unique artistic practice that, in the 1990s, overflowed the dominant disciplinary boundaries of the art world” (El Mundo, 2024). 

Their solo exhibition, which coincides with the release of the box set, opens on Thursday 16 October during Munich’s Long Night of Museums.  

The exhibition is created by Alex Murray-Leslie, Melissa Logan, Kathi Glas, Tina Frank, Anat Ben-David, Liz Dom, Leslie Johnson and Mohammad Bayesteh. It features works made with all their collaborators and Kiki Moorse, who is back performing in the group at special concerts having left in 2006.   

Staged at the exhibition will be Chicks on Speed’s expanded cinematic works, collection of 300 costumes made by kathi Glas, screen-printed textiles made with Johnny Dogday, scenographic paintings and banners and archive of Objektinstruments – self-made wearable-tech musical instruments and sound sculptures invented by Logan, Murray-Leslie and collaboratoring technologists and artists, along side their series of six interactive iPad apps are displayed – made in conjunction with the ZKM Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, and technologist Jens Barth.  

These include the Andy Banana app which takes a playful twist on art and technology by turning a vocoder microphone into the form of a banana, blending humour with iconic cultural references. And the High Heeled Shoe Guitar app – the culmination of a decade of Alex’s PhD in artistic research into high-heeled shoes as instruments, aimed at challenging societal notions of femininity and the dominance of male guitar solos, Chicks on Speed presents the ultimate version of the High Heeled Shoe Guitar app, which allows players to manipulate sound effects, perform the instrument on an iPad, or even explore augmented reality and telematic hybrid performances.  

There’s also the Spray Paint app, which transforms drawing into a sound-generating experience, allowing users to create colourful, abstract visuals while simultaneously producing unique sounds based on the spray action. Different colours and spray cap sizes generate varying audio effects, merging visual art with music creation in an interactive, multisensory experience. And Lips, which transforms audience members into active performers, inviting them to sing along with the band’s track ‘Vodka and le Rock n Roll’, Using augmented reality, the app captures the user’s face and overlays isolated lips from the Chicks on Speed members, syncing with the live performance.  

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.”