Ladytron – Time’s Arrow review

“They only want you when you’re seventeen/When you’re twenty one, you’re no fun”

Over the latter course of 2021 TikTok began getting flooded with clips of teenagers miming those words; by the end of the year more than 200,00 different versions had been uploaded, the sort of accidental popular wave which many label bosses are trying to trigger purposefully. The platform after all is having an increasingly critical impact on music marketing.

The weird thing was that the lyrics source was Seventeen, a song first released in 2002 by Liverpool synth romantics Ladytron. The connection was rooted in a frustration with disposability, both of people and things, at the heart of the uber-consumerist twenty first century. That a load of kids felt it was still resonant enough loop back two decades told you that for them very little has changed.

This unlikely exposure proved to be all the motivation the quartet needed to complete Time’s Arrow, their seventh album and one themed around the concept that experience is processed in the moment without the benefit of hindsight.

Despite their youthful new audience, the material pulls on familiar threads, from California’s wispy chillwave to the cinematic, titular closer. At it’s future/retro peak on Sargasso Sea, Faces and the enigmatic Misery Remember Me, this is music that the children of today’s children may someday choose to mime to, perhaps from the dark side of someone’s moon.

You can read a full review here.