the band began working on Hot Trip to Heaven around 1993, deliberately starting work on the album without any guitars "so that it would be something new and novel for us." This was a departure from the band's 1980s work, where the band started songs and them worked on them using guitar, bass and drums. The band self-produced Hot Trip to Heaven, while working with engineer Kevin White. While the band remained signed to Beggars Banquet in their native United Kingdom, they were dropped by the label in the United States for failing to follow-up on hit single "So Alive", and signed to Rick Rubin's label American Recordings for the release of the album. Music Hot Trip to Heaven is a diverse and experimental album, radically replacing the alternative rock sound of their previous work with electronic and dance influences, including from genres such as ambient, techno, ambient techno, trip hop, and house, and incorporating elements from Britain's house and ambient dance scenes. Hot Press described the album as a highly unique hybrid of trance, ambient, techno, world and industrial music. Billboard felt the album saw the band reinventing themselves "as moody, ambient groovemeisters." The songs on the album are longer and possess a broader tonal range in comparison to the band's previous records. Ash's guitar work on the album has been compared to Robert Fripp and Phil Manzanera, though critic Fay Wolftree felt the shaping of his guitar sound "owes more to Brian Eno and his bank of analogue synths than any player of stringed instruments." David J's bass playing largely leans towards dub, while also running with Haskins' drumming "to maintain an insistent sense of threat or promise." Natacha Atlas, who had worked with earlier in the 1990s, also contributes additional vocals and percussion to the album, which Wolftree feel largely contribute to the album's "world and ethnic feel," feeling Atlas' sporadic singing and warm percussion contrast well with Ash's voice. Songs The hypnotic 14-minute long "Body and Soul", inspired particularly by The Orb, opens the album, signalling the band's new direction with whispered vocals and "pulsing cycles of electrotones," before reaching a lengthy, chiming main phase "of repetitive psychedelic melodies" that pay homage to Eno and the Beatles, two of the band's biggest influences. Journalist Frank Tortorici described the song as "electronica meets the Beatles." Wolftree called the song "insistently trancey" with a conspicuous rhythm section. "Ugly",