What are Stereolab, exactly? Folding seemingly incompatible elements into a blend that’s both natural and outlandish, the veteran post-rockers have never been easy to define—they only stopped evolving when they hung up their hat in 2009. The Groop regrouped in 2019; Instant Holograms on Metal Film is the band’s first studio album in 15 years. But despite a tracklisting that reads almost like parody—“Mystical Plosives,” “Vermona F Transistor,” the quintessentially ’Lab-esque “Esemplastic Creeping Eruption”—the record doesn’t suggest any particularly easy answers.
We know who they are: guitarist Tim Gane, singer Laetitia Sadier, and a cast of bandmates gathered around the former romantic couple’s Anglo-French alliance. We know that they formed in London in the early ’90s and powered through a raft of studio albums before splitting in 2009. But the band’s fundamental essence has always been difficult to capture: a slippery mixture of krautrock, yé-yé, electronics, easy listening, avant-garde collage, and left-wing politics that shifts, twitches, and mutates whenever you get it under the microscope. Stereolab are relentlessly shape-shifting—yet they always sound exactly like themselves.
Instant Holograms on Metal Film brings a new producer (Bitchin Bajas’ Cooper Crain), new musicians (jazz cornetist Ben LaMar Gay, percussionist Ric Elsworth), and new vocalists (including Marie Merlet, formerly of Sadier’s Monade) into the Stereolab orbit. Nevertheless, the album sounds resolutely Stereolab. Most of the key qualities that define the band are present and correct—motorik chug, bubbling Moogs, odd analog squiggles, and, above all, Sadier’s vocals, cool but engaged, glowing with the discreet passion of a hotel lobby rendezvous. The record also has touches of the radical vocal interplay that Sadier and the late Mary Hansen perfected in Stereolab’s mid-’90s imperial phase, when the two singers transcended rockist ideas of lead and backing vocal in favor of a gorgeously interlaced, ego-free fusion.
The band’s characteristic mid-song switch-ups also appear frequently, swaggering in with the unexpected emotional jolt of a visit from a friend you’d forgotten you missed. Halfway through “Immortal Hands,” a strutting drum-machine rhythm kicks the hitherto languid song into a newly animated phase. “Melodie is a Wound,” meanwhile, adds a sunny Beach Boys-and-synths coda to the song’s baroque melancholia that builds to a furiously fuzzed-up climax. At moments like these, Stereolab’s music feels both intricately planned and strangely loose, with the telepathic connection of a well-drilled jazz quintet or a jam band with decades of experience in the collective fanny pack.
But as soon as you zoom in a little and try to work out exactly which Stereolab records Instant Holograms on Metal Film reminds you of, the possibilities spiral out of control. The album is animated by the great electrical thrust of early Stereolab, for instance in the galloping motorik beat of “Electrified Teenybop!” (albeit minus the visceral guitar rush of those first records); it sports the influence of jazz, which bubbles up through the bewitching chord progressions of “Immortal Hands”; there are Dots and Loops electronic touches on “Mystical Plosives” and the even more Dots-esque marimba on “Immortal Hands”; not to mention the the plasticky, retro-futuristic charm of the antiquated drum-machine tick on “Colour Television.” Instant Holograms on Metal Film sounds like the Platonic idea of Stereolab, rather than being a repeat of any particular LP, which is a neat trick for a reunion album to pull off.
If there is something genuinely new on Instant Holograms on Metal Film, it comes in addition of men’s voices, from bassist Xavi Muñoz and keyboard player Joe Watson, on songs like “Aerial Troubles,” “Le Coeur et la Force,” and “Esemplastic Creeping Eruption.” This isn’t entirely unexplored territory for Stereolab—Jean-Baptiste Garnero, of the French band Spring, is credited with backing vocals on Mars Audiac Quintet’s “Transporté sans Bouger.” But it isn’t something they have done a lot of. Sadier’s vocals bounced off Gina Morris’ in the early years, then intertwined with Hansen’s, then—rather tragically—played off against her own multi-tracked voice after Hansen died in 2002. (Hansen’s niece, Australian-British songwriter and producer Molly Read, adds “special guest backing vocals” to “Vermona F Transistor,” a neat emotional touch.)
Stereolab were never able to replace the eerily instinctive skein of Hansen and Sadier’s vocals, which were so close they felt like two flowers from the same stem, and it is no slight against Muñoz, Watson, and co. that Instant Holograms on Metal Film’s songs lack the chimerical vocal magic of classic Stereolab. “Aerial Troubles,” with cleverly patchworked vocals from Sadier, Muñoz, Watson, and Merlet, is a nifty musical puzzle but nowhere near as spellbinding as Stereolab in full flight. And on the otherwise excellent “Melodie Is a Wound,” Sadier goes it alone, her voice sounding oddly lonely without its melodic counterparts.
Instant Holograms on Metal Film is a relatively safe album—not exactly a retread of past glories, but far from a great leap forward. Still, a safe Stereolab album is like a middling Can record, which is to say far from the beige wash of most bands’ comfortable late periods. And there are a handful of genuinely beautiful songs, showcasing the sharp melodic skills that are a sometimes overlooked weapon in the Stereolab armor. “Melodie Is a Wound” is an absolute earworm, in the nagging style of “Ping Pong”; “Flashes From Everywhere” is perfectly, stridently melancholic; and the Chemical Chords-ish “If You Remember I Forgot How to Dream Pt. 1” is pop music as positive affirmation, its cool melody like a soft-focus call to arms.
At the same time, Sadier’s lyrics of self-empowerment in the face of capitalist duplicity feel more relevant than we might like, in the second Trump era. “Greed is an unfillable hole,” she trills on “Aerial Troubles,” more sad than angry. “Flawed, the extradition request/Blown, the freedom of conscience,” she solemnly intones on “Melodie Is a Wound,” and we furiously nod our heads in agreement. “Je dis ‘non’/A la guerre,” she concludes on “If You Remember I Forgot How to Dream Pt. 1,” and we eagerly say “non” with her. (When she namechecks philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s “rhizomic maze” in “You Remember I Forgot How To Dream Part 2,” she makes the concept sound more improbably dreamy than your average graduate student ever could.)
Stereolab have a reputation as a cerebral band, but as these songs show, their braininess never comes at the expense of emotion: These are angry, sad, hopeful songs that offer catharsis and solidarity. This mixture—of pulsating brains and jangling nerves, beating hearts and open minds—may be the closest we get to the essence of Stereolab; and in this, Instant Holograms on Metal Film is a laudable comeback.
