Songfacts®:

• This was one of the first songs that Hot Chip's Joe Goddard and Alexis Taylor wrote for the band's fifth album, In Our Heads. The song originated from a sample of a two-note flute melody, and Goddard told Pitchfork its main inspiration was James Holden's remix of English electronic music artist Nathan Fake's track "The Sky Was Pink."
• The song was the first one to be released from In Our Heads. The band chose it as the first track to be made public as a left turn for listeners: "I like it when bands come back with something that's fresh and unusual, you know?," Goddard told Pitchfork. "It's a more ambitious song than other things we've done in the past. I worked on it a lot to make sure it's constantly developing in an unusual way. I'm pleased with how it turned out."
• The dizzying eight-minute video features a continuously spinning camera as the band performs the song in their studio.
• Guitarist Al Doyle explained the influence of "The Sky Was Pink" on this track to Spin magazine. "The chord progressions in that song I think were very influential because it takes ages for the chords to come around again," he said. "25 measures or something for the whole sequence to begin again."
  
  [Producer-DJ] Kris Wadsworth is not really a guy who does edits, but he's a new sort of Detroit-y guy," he added. "He's doing a sort of quite hard sounding, quite dark dance music. 'Flutes' doesn't sound particularly Detroit-y, but it's got that sort of expansiveness to it that I think he's doing really well at the moment."