Instant Holograms On Metal Film
Each Stereolab album functions as a portal to a future we once imagined but never achieved: a world of flying cars, egg chairs, and space-age bachelor pads where the coolest Franco-pop, German psychedelic, and Brazilian jazz records are spinning 24/7. And so it remains on the indie icons’ first new album in 15 years, which begins with a minute-long flourish of oscillating synths that sounds like an old mainframe being rebooted back to life. *Instant Holograms on Metal Film* finds the Stereolab machine in perfect working order after an extended period of inactivity, and, if anything, the group sounds eager to make up for lost time with gloriously overstuffed songs that key in on familiar pleasure points while introducing all manner of shapeshifting surprises. “Immortal Hands” eases you into a laidback loungey groove before hitching itself to a funky drum-machine beat and coasting through a dizzying swirl of brass and flutes; “Electrified Teenybop!” plays like the theme music to some alternate-universe dance show where the kids get down to a frenetic fusion of ping-ponging Kraftwerkian electronics and lustrous disco orchestrations. But, as ever, Stereolab’s splendorous soundworld is built atop a foundation of pointed political commentary addressing our present-day struggles and inequalities: Embedded within the breezy kaleidoscopic pop of “Melodie Is a Wound” is a scathing indictment of social media disinformation and the oppressive elites that manipulate it to their advantage. And yet, when the band returns to their motorik hypno-rock roots for the song’s exhilarating second act, they reassure us that utopia is still within our reach.
The Groop’s first album in 15 years sounds like the Platonic ideal of a Stereolab album: cerebral, slippery, playful, and defiant.
While many of Stereolab’s signature moves are on display on Instant Holograms on Metal Film, these arrangement choices never feel gratuitous or as if the band are merely playing to the gallery.
Stereolab return with their first album in 15 years and bring a political fury beneath their sophisticated pop grooves
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Stereolab’s ‘Instant Holograms on Metal Film’ proves that nothing has come loose in the time since their last album.
Instant Holograms On Metal Film by Stereolab album review by Victoria Borlando for Northern Transmissions. The LP drops on May 22nd via Warp
Motorik grooves, Marxist critique and vintage synths – in their first album since 2010, Lætitia Sadier et al pick up where they left off yet sound more timely than ever
Stereolab always walked a knife edge between deadly serious and dead silly. Their sound was constructed around the sort of reference points – French, German and Brazilian psychedelia, Radiophonic Workshop sound effects, 1960s library music – which back in pre-streaming, pre-discogs days of the early 1990s when they started out you had to be a proper nerd to have any grasp of.