Stereolab’s first album in 15 years is not a Hologram—it’s a miracle. When the band, founded by Tim Gane and Laetitia Sadier, ground to a halt at the end of the ’00s after nearly two decades together, it truly seemed like the end. Gane and Sadier had broken up as a couple in 2002, the same year longtime member Mary Hansen died after being hit by a truck while riding her bike in London. That tragedy took some wind out of their creative sails, but Stereolab continued through two more enjoyable albums: 2004’s Margerine Eclipse and 2008’s Chemical Chords. By the time 2010’s Not Music—featuring songs left over from the Chemical Chords sessions—was released, Gane, Sadier, and the rest of the groop (their preferred spelling) had already scattered to new projects.
When Stereolab reunited to tour in 2019, in the midst of their extensive album reissue campaign, Gane and Sadier were positioned on opposite ends of the stage, as far apart as physics would allow and at times it felt less a reunion than a negotiated truce. They kept touring, but the idea they might make new music seemed unlikely. And yet, here we are with Instant Holograms On Metal Film, an album that finds their unique chemistry not only intact but shining bright.
“I see everything as a continuum with no determined sections, that bears no relation to what has come before or will come after,” says Sadier, adding that while Gane is the “primary composer,” she “had much more musical input than before. And indeed I had had some practice through developing my own music over the past years, which surely nourished the sound and general configuration.”
Instant Holograms On Metal Film does just about everything you want a Stereolab album to do, checking all the boxes: VU guitar chug, motorik drumming, bleepy-bloopy analog synths, vibraphone, horns, wondrously layered harmonies, lefty lyrics, “bah-dee-dah” choruses, and titles that seem like they were generated by a random phrase creator (but in this case were at least partially pulled from the October 1970 issue of Electronics Australia). It all makes for a warmly familiar record, welcoming you like family—record nerd family—at the airport.
Like they did in the mid-’90s, Stereolab found inspiration in a Chicagoan—this time with Cooper Crain of trippy electronic trio Bitchin Bajas, with whom Stereolab toured in 2019. Crain recorded and engineered the album, and mixed it alongside Gane and Sadier. “When we decided to make a new record, he was the only person I had in mind and luckily he could do it,” says Gane. “Just like [previous Windy City collaborators] John McEntire and Jim O’Rourke, he is an inventive musician as well as a great engineer/producer, and that’s what we like.”
Crain also plays a lot of synthesizers on Instant Holograms and feels almost like a member of the groop, which, in addition to Gane and Sadier, includes longtime drummer Andy Ramsay, multi-instrumentalist Joseph Watson (with the band since the ’00s), and new member Xavier Muñoz, ported over from Sadier’s Source Ensemble. The album also features contributions from Ben LaMar Gay, Gane’s Cavern of Anti-Matter partner Holger Zapf, Bitchin Bajas’ Rob Frye (on various woodwinds), Sadier’s Monade bandmate Marie Merlet, percussionist Ric Elsworth, and Mary Hansen’s niece Molly Hansen Read. The only notable absence is Sean O’Hagan of High Llamas, whose string and brass arrangements have graced nearly every other Stereolab album.
Despite the lineup changes, this is the Stereolab you remember—at least the one that emerged around 1994’s Mars Audiac Quintet and made classics like Emperor Tomato Ketchup and Dots and Loops. Melody is at the forefront, all in the band’s signature style, with lots of room for instrumental zones to stretch out. For a group many still consider to be outré, Instant Holograms is kosmische comfort food—and that’s ok. They’re not breaking much new ground, but nobody else sounds like them—not imitators, and not even Gane or Sadier’s various post-Lab projects.
Behold: the chug of “Arial Troubles”; the way the guitars and keyboards layer together on the breezy first half of “Melody Is a Wound” before giving way to the extended groove of its second half that ebbs and flows back to life more than once; the flutes, syncopated drumming, and intertwined vocals of the jazzy, blissful “Vermona F Transistor”; and the exceedingly bouncy, horn-filled, two-part “If You Remember I Forgot How to Dream.” It’s all extremely satisfying stuff.
As for the decidedly socialist lyrics, Sadier is still offering up situationist sloganeering full of five-dollar words—but despite these songs being written in some of the darkest, most uncertain times most of us have ever experienced, there’s a hopeful undercurrent running through much of it. Where she once sang, “Don’t worry, shut up, sit down / Go with it and be happy” with a seething smile, a more typical lyric here is “I’m the creator of this reality / I’m the creator – not the joker who pretends a god to be.” It’s hope for revolution. And if Stereolab can get back together and make a record this good, maybe anything is possible.