Stereolab Make Their Groovy Return

Even as the world burns down around us, a glimmer of late-’90s utopianism appears in the air: just a couple weeks after Chicago post-rock giants Tortoise announced their return to new music, the world’s greatest space-rock lounge act has now done the same. Yes, on May 23, Stereolab will release their first new album in 15 years, which comes with a title that might has well have been spit out of a Stereolab album name generator: Instant Holograms on Metal Film. On the first single, “Aerial Troubles,” they pick up right where they left off, which is a very good thing indeed. 

The new song incorporates a number of the band’s trademark moves. It’s built on a tricky time signature, but presented in a way that minimizes the off-kilter nature of its own rhythm, streamlining it until it might as well be a straightforward dance beat. There are three different overlapping vocal lines, sometimes finishing each others’ thoughts, sometimes speaking over each other. There are squelchy analog synth sounds that evoke a past generation’s visions of futures that never transpired. As ever, Stereolab sound like they could be playing live from a cocktail bar where George Jetson hangs out when he gets off of work on Friday evenings, and further complicate their groovy retrofuturism with withering critiques of the present. “Aerial Troubles” bemoans an “insatiable state of consumption” and the “unfillable hole” of greed. Taken together with the propulsive optimism of the music, it all seems to say, This is how good things could be for humanity, if only we could get our shit together.

All of which is classic Stereolab. If you told me “Aerial Troubles” was a lost B-side from the Emperor Tomato Ketchup sessions, I wouldn’t bat an eye. It seems oddly fitting that a band so concerned with lost futures would continue to churn forever in their particular imaginary one, but the song also offers an interesting glimpse of something different. It’s subtle but unmistakable: In the closing stretch of “Aerial Troubles,” after the band has dropped out, a new synth sound enters for an instrumental coda, one that is more icily digital than the usual Stereolab palette, more Blade Runner than The Jetsons. I’d love to hear more music from them in that mode, and I hope it’s a sign that they’ll be exploring it further on Instant Holograms. 

I could be reading too much into this brief outro, but the music video, directed by Laurent Askienazy, also treats it as a sort of major event. After four minutes of visuals set in an eerie version of the mid- 20th century, with a bunch of smartly dressed suburbanites entranced by the images on old-timey film projectors and black-and-white TV screens, the visual sensibility suddenly shifts at that moment, glitching out and pixelating like a low-quality internet stream. Whether or not it portends anything about the album, it’s a gorgeous video.