• Reviews

• All
• Music
• DVDs
• Live
• Cinema
• TV
• Books
• Comic Books
• Video Games

May 22, 2025 Web Exclusive By Scotty Dransfield

On Instant Holograms on Metal Film, Stereolab return not just with new music, but with renewed purpose. The band’s first studio album in 15 years asks how we might live meaningfully amid systems built on exploitation and decay. Their answer: we create, we pay attention, and we remain responsible to each other.

Stereolab’s sound remains unmistakable, yet newly expansive. Built on motorik grooves, analog synths, and endlessly interlocking instrumental lines, the music fuses elements of Krautrock, lounge jazz, psychedelic pop, and minimalism. The groop leans heavily into extended instrumental passages—many songs stretch past six minutes—where marimba, flute, vibraphone, and modular synths weave into kaleidoscopic patterns. The result is dense but never cluttered, a soundscape that’s dreamy, kinetic, and constantly evolving.

“Aerial Troubles” sets the tone with the situation we’re far too often in these days —“The numbing is not / not working anymore”— alongside a motorik pulse that refuses paralysis. From here, frontwoman Lætitia Sadier and company probe political straits with imaginative verve. “Melodie is a Wound” is the record’s most direct polemic, calling out the propaganda machine: “The war economy is inviolable, violently suppresses all intelligence that conflicts with the stakes of those who drive it.” But the song’s swirling, blissed-out jam elevates the message rather than softens it. Here and elsewhere, Stereolab makes joy feel like resistance.

“Transmuted Matter” offers a spiritual corollary: “Fully human, fully divine, entwined.” Sadier collapses the sacred and the material into one space, inviting the listener to step out of imposed narratives and into embodied clarity. On “Vermona F Transistor,” she delivers the album’s quiet thesis: “I’m the creator of this reality.”

That balance—between awareness and imagination, critique and hope, unbound psychedelia and pop—is what makes Instant Holograms such a generous listen. Even its most euphoric moments are laced with accountability. This isn’t escapism for its own sake, it’s recuperation with intention.

In an era when so much politically aware music feels either performative or joyless, Stereolab have made something far more valuable: a record of moral seriousness and emotional openness, a reminder that the world we want is already stirring in us. (www.stereolab.co.uk)

Author rating: 9/10