New albums from London’s Hot Chip and Berlin’s Sascha Funke revisit pop’s forever shifting divide separating dance-pop from the dance floor. It’s always been a permeable, if not hospitable, line — as purveyors of disco discovered in the 1970s. Today, dance-floor influenced electronic music permeates nearly every facet of pop, yielding a constantly expanding pool of ideas for the producer and artist alike to explore. Hot Chip’s “Made in the Dark” and Mr. Funke’s “Mango,” both out today, offer different recipes for success in mining dance music for pop’s pleasure. On “Made in the Dark,” Hot Chip’s third full-length release, the quintet explodes out of the gate on the first three tracks — “Out at the Pictures,” “Shake a Fist,” and “Ready for the Floor,” each an ornately high-octane alloy of jagged beats and catchy hooks. The songs showcase the wily Hot Chip — vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Alexis Taylor, vocalist/ multi-instrumentalist Joe Goddard, guitarist/percussionist Al Doyle, guitarist Owen Clarke, and percussionist Felix Martin — at its wiry, cheeky best.

“Shake a Fist,” especially, unfolds as a lithe triumph as sinewy layers of synthesizer lines undulate into a rippling melody. Mr. Taylor’s coy quaver breathes such nonchalant lines as “I could be wealthy / nothing to stop me” over this skipping rhythmic frame, and the whole thing jitters like an agitated rattlesnake. Two minutes into the song, though, the track stops abruptly to sample Todd Rundgren’s spoken-word “sounds of the studio” interlude from his 1972 “Something/Anything” album (titled “Intro”), which is followed by a barrage of synthesizer volleys that wouldn’t be out of place on a Timbaland remix. It’s a drastic exit off the song’s bumping beat highway, steered by Hot Chip’s crate-digging record nerds, and the song soon returns to its pulsating groove before the tangent grows tiresome.

“Shake a Fist” is an ideal calibration for the generation currently flooding dance floors, from clubs to “DJ nights” in bars. The men in Hot Chip have both Fatboy Slim and Mr. Rundgren on their mp3 playlists, as well as the Chemical Brothers and R. Kelly. And like LCD Soundsystem, Hot Chip loves to fold chilly 1980s electro-beats into body-thumping 1990s rave melodies to forge a fresh-sounding dance-pop. “Bendable Poseable” is fueled by an appropriately rubbery cadence, with electronic drums clapping behind a woozy synth line.

But “Made in the Dark” soon turns headlong into Hot Chip’s indie-pop roots, territory the band explored on its previous two albums, as well. Its 2006 album, “The Warning,” casually straddled winsome indie-pop and throbbing dance beats. Its finest moments — such as “A Boy From School” and “Over and Over” — found catchy territory separating the Orb from Belle and Sebastian, where twee melodies rode crenellated bass and percussion shapes that pillowed Mr. Taylor’s fey ballads.

On “Made in the Dark,” though, these forays into gossamer pop feel too precious, strung together at the album’s back end after the adrenalized opening songs. “We’re Looking for a Lot of Love” and “In the Privacy of Our Love” are the sort of keyboard-sculpted, love-drunk mopes that sustained Badly Drawn Boy and Travis for a short spell. The title track ventures into outright Van Morrison croon. And “One Pure Thought” sounds like a watered-down Stone Roses.

Only the six-minute-plus “Hold On” saves the album’s second side from outright mediocrity, and it succeeds largely because Hot Chip returns to the dance-inspired percussion chemistry to fuel the joyous, if coy, rocker. It’s a reminder that this band’s strength lies in how it taps the endless mutability of the club DJ to refashion indie pop. In its live shows, Hot Chip is rightfully celebrated for the way it refashions its own material into dance-powered funny-cars, and its informal 2007 entry into the DJ Kicks mix-tape series spotlighted a band that adores an encyclopedic array of pop music. Why the quintet chose to shove its own wild-hair impulses through a narrow and generic indie-pop sieve for a few songs on “Made in the Dark” is anybody’s guess.

The low moments on Hot Chip’s new album remind us that the dance floor is always more liberated than pop at large. Another excellent example of that fact is Sascha Funke’s seductive gem of a release, “Mango,” just the second proper album in a discography that includes countless 12-inch dance singles.

On these nine songs (in just under 55 minutes), the Berlin-based producer shape-shifts through minimal techno moods that feel as ethereal as a snow-covered Bavarian forest. A stretched and fragmented piano chord opens “We Are Facing the Sun,” setting up a down-tempo pulse and wispy synth notes. Ambient background noise fades in to suggest the titular sound of “Summer Rain,” giving way to an elegant wash of strings and keyboards. And a gently plucked guitar introduces warm accents to the chilled-out bliss of “Chemin des Figons.”

Mr. Funke never reaches the ecstatic pop highs that Hot Chip aims for, but he so deftly achieves his modest goal of making gorgeous music that his record feels much more satisfying. He may never light up a hipster dance party the way Hot Chip can right now, but when the next generation of indie production wizards start looking for new ideas, expect to find “Mango” in their crates.