Any moment is an excellent one for new music from the long-running retro-avant pop band Stereolab, but Instant Holograms on Metal Film, Stereolab’s first full-length since 2010’s Not Music, is particularly well-timed. Blending gliding grooves, wowing-and-fluttering synthesizers, and lyrics that elegantly pine for more, Stereolab’s music blisses out without tuning out. Their eleventh album’s first lyric, which arrives over the elegiac opening chords of second track “Aerial Troubles,” declares, “the numbing is not, it is not working anymore”; it then hairpin-turns into a dance-ready beat, implicitly declaring that the best way to counter any obliteration-worthy despair is to create, and to create movement as well.
Instant Holograms on Metal Film is an hour of prime-grade Stereolab. Precisely crafted pop gems like the vibey “Transmuted Matter,” an abstracted love song with a wordless breakdown that breathes life into its notions of the divine, flow into hypnotic instrumentals like the whirling “Electrified Teenybop!” and stretched-out jams like the forceful “Melodie Is a Wound.” That track, one of the album’s high points, opens with a crash course in media literacy — “The goal is to manipulate/Heavy hands to intimidate/Snuff out the very idea of clarity,” vocalist-songwriter Laetitia Sadier muses over a persistent beat — before veering off into an ever-murkier quadrant of space, the music’s increasing speed and intensity seemingly trying to outpace the malevolent forces of disinformation.
Sadier and multi-instrumentalist Tim Gane are at the core of Stereolab, and on Instant Holograms they’re joined by their touring band — drummer Andy Ramsay, vocalist-keyboardist Joe Watson, and bassist Xavi Muñoz — as well as contributors that include the album’s recording engineer Cooper Crain, of Chicago atmospherists Bitchin Bajas, and Marie Merlet, Sadier’s former bandmate in dream-pop outfit Monade. “Vermona F Transistor,” a moody cut that veers between the shimmying and the shimmering, features backing vocals from Molly Hansen Read, the niece of former Stereolab guitarist Mary Hansen, who died in 2002.
It's tempting to describe Stereolab’s music with terms that denote coolness — they play with various visions of “the future” that were born in the idealistic past yet can still be longed for today. But what makes Instant Holograms on Metal Film such a crucial listen for this moment is the stormy yet ultimately hopeful emotionalism powering its motorized beats and musical oscillations. “We’re embodied here, power to choose/Wisdom, faith, courage are necessary,” Sadier declares amidst the encroaching chaos of of closing track “If You Remember I Forgot How to Dream Pt. 2.” It's one of the many urgent reminders delivered in Instant Holograms on Metal Film’s shrewdly breezy calls for a better tomorrow.
