Stereolab – Instant Holograms On Metal Film review

Fifteen years is a long time between records. Such though is the monolithic nature of the oligarchies that Stereolab had ranged themselves against, imagining that the absence of new material is because things have all worked out since Chemical Chords and Not Music were released requires the innocence of babes.

In process the group – who initially began working together again to support some reissues – found the making of Instant Holograms on Metal Film familiar enough to lay down its core in six weeks. Singer Laetitia Sadier meanwhile has spoken of trying to avoid the curse of repetition by employing lyrical cut ups and incorporating ‘chance elements’ into her songwriting. 

Would be revolutionaries? Stereolab despite the noise have never been that. Instead, they use their eleventh album to poke what they see as a dying political and social system with an intellectual stick. In the retro-chic foment Verona F Transistor Sadier decries those hell bent on self-deification, whilst Aerial Troubles welcomes the inevitable civilisational rupture with anticipation.

Acerbic but so they claim fundamentally optimistic, Instant Holograms on Metal Film is rarely, if ever, as bleak as it reads. Fifteen years from now, we’ll know whether they were right to be so.

You can read a full review here.