“Instant Holograms On Metal Film” is the first Stereolab album in 15 years, featuring 13 new studio recordings. There’s a sophistication to the band’s gentle, thoughtful, propulsive indie pop that extends beyond frontwoman Laetitia Sadier’s French coo. It’s in Andy Ramsay’s gentle but decisive snare taps, the texture of Tim Gane’s guitar, and the webs of vintage synths that scaffold each song.
Sometimes, like on ‘Aerial Troubles’, you get so engrossed in their groove it’s jarring when it ends. Thankfully, there’s always another uber-cool synthy jam to swallow you up.
There’s a certain sense of comfort in hearing that the first new album from Stereolab in 15 years contains much of what made their back catalogue so beloved and continuously rewarding: lush jazz-pop arrangements, twisty time signatures, splashes of Marxist politics, pop-art visual aesthetics, playfully dadaist song titles and a sense of melody that prevails in spite of or perhaps even because of their litany of avant garde influences.
It’s identifiably, unmistakably a Stereolab album, reacquainting us with the groop’s playfully cerebral aesthetic, always evolving but identifiably their own, whether drifting into dreamy ambience or firing up some “Electrified Teenybop!” “The sound of Instant Holograms on Metal Film” after so much, even arriving after all this time, is enough to make you believe no time had passed at all since they brought a close to their first act—the logic of the timeline of their choosing is the only one that matters.
Played by Laetitia Sadier, Tim Gane, Andy Ramsay, Joe Watson and Xavi Muñoz, with contributions from Cooper Crain and Rob Frye of Bitchin Bajas, Ben LaMar Gay (composer/jazz multi instrumentalist), Holger Zapf (Cavern of Anti Matter), Marie Merlet (Monade) and Molly Read among others.
The group will be playing live throughout 2025, with shows in Europe, North America, South America and the UK.
The album follows “Not Music” released in 2010; remastered and expanded reissues of seven of their albums in 2019; and volumes 4 and 5 in the Switched On series appearing in 2021 and 2022 respectively.
The Fat Angel Sings 