After the first rumour circulated, Joe Goddard created a reverse rumour, saying that Minogue had written a track for Hot Chip. He told "NME", "Kylie wrote a song for us, She sent it through our management to us – it was totally bizarre. It was the beginnings of a track – I think she wrote it and just thought, 'This would be perfect for Hot Chip', or possibly for a collaboration. It's a crazy song. It's industrial and clanging and even has farmyard animal noises on it. It's the kind of music you'd never normally associate with Kylie. When I'm allowed to send it around it's going to change a few people's ideas about her. Maybe it's one for our next album, after "Made in the Dark"." Taylor later admitted that it was a joke created to fool people because the band were tired of people phoning them up to ask why Minogue had apparently rejected a song she did not hear. In January 2010, Goddard stated that "at the beginning there was some contact. As I recall, we were going to do a session with one of her writers" but both Hot Chip and Minogue were too busy at the time. He added "there was a grain of truth in the beginning, but then it all snowballed into some big silly thing". When asked, in 2010, about giving a song to Minogue, he stated that it would be "amazing". The album is influenced by music Goddard and Taylor listened to during their childhood and adolescence, such as Prince's "Sign o' the Times" and the Beatles' self-titled album. Taylor explained why Hot Chip's albums "go from one mood to another so readily", by saying "Eclectic music has been our first musical background" and that he and Goddard had different musical interests when they were younger. "Made in the Dark" is influenced by contemporary artists such as Black Dice and Will Oldham. Taylor appreciated Oldham for his minimalism of "just acoustic guitar and harmonium and voice for the whole record" and wanted Hot Chip to emulate him. In an interview with "Pitchfork" in October 2007, Taylor said there would be an equal proportion of electronic elements to live material, as the band doesn't "do things by adding one thing and taking something else away". The album contained maximalist and minimalist songs; several tracks on the album were influenced by rock and heavy metal music, and the track "Wrestlers" started taking a new direction because the band was "wrestling with the idea of making an R. Kelly kind of slick R and B number" and ultimately "[sounded] more like Randy Newman's "Short People".