Latest news with #JoeDilworth
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
8 New Albums You Should Listen to Now: Stereolab, Smerz, and More
All products featured on Pitchfork are independently selected by Pitchfork editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, Condé Nast may earn an affiliate commission. Stereolab, photo by Joe Dilworth With so much good music being released all the time, it can be hard to determine what to listen to first. Every week, Pitchfork offers a run-down of significant new releases available on streaming services. This week's batch includes new projects from Stereolab, Smerz, Sparks, Sophia Kennedy, MSPaint, These New Puritans, Home Is Where, and Lindstrøm. Subscribe to Pitchfork's New Music Friday newsletter to get our recommendations in your inbox every week. (All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our affiliate links, however, Pitchfork earns an affiliate commission.) In the 15 years since their last proper album, Stereolab have kept busy with ongoing reunion tours and a reissue program to rival that of the Beatles. Now, the maestros of kosmische indie-pop have come to reclaim their crown, returning to the studio with 13 originals that whirr and whizz with the same analog-chanson joy that has made them a perennial inspiration to alternative pop tinkerers for decades. Read Ben Cardew's review of Instant Holograms on Metal Film. Listen on Apple Music Listen on Spotify Listen on Tidal Listen on Amazon Music Listen/Buy at Bandcamp Buy at Rough Trade Four years after debuting with the minimalist mission statement Believer, Norwegian duo Smerz return with a new batch of retrofuturist warehouse pop on second album Big City Life. Set to stark beats, the grayscale record laces daydreamy monologues with wisps of satiny R&B and occasional, eerie piano lines that seem to have wandered in from a Shostakovich recital. The result is an exercise in controlled chaos, full of moments of plainspoken wonder. Listen on Apple Music Listen on Spotify Listen on Tidal Listen on Amazon Music Listen/Buy at Bandcamp Buy at Rough Trade Sparks are still flying high on Mad!, the latest album of hare-brained confections from the duo celebrated in Edgar Wright's Sparks Brothers documentary. Maverick siblings Ron and Russel Mael sharpen their knives for a playful evisceration of topics including banter and the rise of influencers on the follow-up to The Girl Is Crying in Her Latte, in a series of pop operettas that remind us of all the silliest ways one can put melodic genius to use. Listen on Apple Music Listen on Spotify Listen on Tidal Listen on Amazon Music Listen/Buy at Bandcamp Buy at Rough Trade Squeeze Me is the latest from Baltimore-born artist Sophia Kennedy, who splits her time between Berlin and Hamburg. The 10-song LP follows her 2021 release, Monsters, and her collaborations with DJ Koze; first on 2023's 'Wespennest' and again on this year's 'Der Fall' and 'Die Gondel.' Kennedy has shared a handful of singles from her new, more stripped-back record, including 'Rodeo,' 'Hot Match,' and 'Imaginary Friend.' Listen on Apple Music Listen on Spotify Listen on Tidal Listen on Amazon Music Listen/Buy at Bandcamp Buy at Rough Trade MSPaint's new five-track EP, No Separation, follows the Hattiesburg, Mississippi, synth-punk group's 2023 debut, Post-American. No Separation was produced by Julian Cashwan Pratt and Harlan Steel of New York hardcore band Show Me the Body. MSPaint announced the new record with their single 'Angel,' which arrived with a dystopian music video starring director Alex Thiel. Listen on Apple Music Listen on Spotify Listen on Tidal Listen on Amazon Music Listen/Buy at Bandcamp These New Puritans became an overnight cult phenomenon with their 2010 album Hidden, an album that paired Jack Barnett's murmured mantras and medieval compositions with his brother George's militant beats. Their albums since have taken that premise along wildly divergent paths, taking Talk Talk and Depeche Mode textures to their logical end point in Crooked Wing. The culminating album, led by the Caroline Polachek–assisted 'Industrial Love Song,' is by turns epic, quiet, gorgeous, and ungodly. Or, as George Barnett put it more simply in press materials, 'Jack on a piano, me smashing the living daylights out of some drums.' Listen on Apple Music Listen on Spotify Listen on Tidal Listen on Amazon Music Listen/Buy at Bandcamp Buy at Rough Trade Home Is Where broke out making athletic, anthemic hardcore, and have only limbered up with time. Hunting Season, the emo-rock outfit's third album and the follow-up to 2023's The Whaler, is looser and shaggier than its predecessors, written in a period when frontwoman Bea MacDonald 'was homesick and Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers' first record specifically sounded like home.' Fear not: The songs still find their moments to thrash, resulting in an album that feels like embarking on a freewheeling road trip while your companion waves a machete out the window. Listen on Apple Music Listen on Spotify Listen on Tidal Listen on Amazon Music Listen/Buy at Bandcamp Buy at Rough Trade For the follow-up to 2023's Everyone Else Is a Stranger, Lindstrøm relaunched the Feedelity label that the Norwegian producer founded back in 2003. He marks the occasion with a reset to the bubbly euphoria explored during his ascent. Lead single 'Cirkl,' he said in press materials, 'taps into the same energy I explored with those early releases, while also pushing into new sounds and ideas. It's minimal in structure, with a warm and uplifting energy.' Listen on Apple Music Listen on Spotify Listen on Tidal Listen on Amazon Music Listen/Buy at Bandcamp Buy at Rough Trade Originally Appeared on Pitchfork
The Guardian
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Stereolab: Instant Holograms on Metal Film review – after 15 years, the retro-futurists make a radiant return
The first sound you hear on Stereolab's first new studio album in 15 years is a burst of arpeggiated synth tones. It sounds not unlike the once futuristic ident of a long-defunct TV channel. The first words you hear Lætita Sadier and backing vocalist Marie Merlet sing – their voices winding around each other in a sweet-but-sad melody, over the tight, mid-tempo rhythm of Aerial Troubles – are 'the numbing is not working any more / An unfillable hole, an insatiable state of consumption (systemic) / assigned trajectory (extortion).' To which, of course, the seasoned Stereolab fan might break into a contented smile of recognition and sigh 'mais naturellement'. A retro-futurist aesthetic; tight, hypnotic grooves derived from the motorik krautrock of Neu!; vintage synthesiser tones and vocals that entwine around each other; lyrics that take a dim Marxist/situationist-influenced view of modern life: this is very much what Stereolab spent the 90s and early 00s dealing in, during a career in which they occupied their own space slightly apart from everything else. They were a product of the low-rent London indie scene documented in former drummer Joe Dilworth's 2024 book Everything, All at Once Forever, but sounded nothing like any of its other participants. The closest they came to mainstream success – a couple of Top 20 albums, a lot of radio play for their 1994 single Ping Pong – was during the Britpop era, but they clearly had almost nothing in common with Britpop. Aspects of their sound or aesthetic chimed variously with post-rock, the easy listening revival, leftfield electronica, and the curious 90s midlands underground scene that begat Pram, Broadcast and Plone, but Stereolab never quite fitted with any of them. No one familiar with their back catalogue is going to play Instant Holograms on Metal Film and wonder aloud at who it's by. It's all very Stereolab, from the song titles – Colour Television, Electrified Teenybop! and Vermona F Transistor – to its sound, which is impressively eclectic without really shifting outside the admittedly wide-ranging palette of styles they deployed in their initial incarnation. Immortal Hands shifts from jazzy sunshine pop to drum-machine-driven funk; a hint of drum'n'bass lurks around the agitated rhythm of Transmuted Matter; the bouncy keyboard riff of Esemplastic Creeping Eruption seems to have been transplanted into the song from a lost 70s kids' show. Perhaps more importantly, anyone familiar with their back catalogue should be delighted to learn that Instant Holograms on Metal Film offers a very strong example of Stereolab doing what they do. The criticism that frequently dogged them was that there was something arid and dispassionate about their collaging of recherche musical influences and political theory: it was terribly clever rather than heartfelt. But for all Sadier's cool detachment, there's a warmth and brightness to the sound and the yé-yé and easy listening-derived melodies. The instrumental Electrified Teenybop! feels gleeful enough to deserve its exclamation mark; the flute-adorned Flashes from Everywhere is a breezy joy. It never sounds like people conducting an experiment so much as a reconvened band genuinely enjoying working together. Amid the album's references to the death of modernity and Deleuze and Guttari's Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, you could read the lyrics of Esemplastic Creeping Eruption, with their talk of 'reconciliations', leaving 'the realm of oppositions' and the 'bountiful tap' of creativity as being about nothing more complicated than reforming the band. Sign up to Sleeve Notes Get music news, bold reviews and unexpected extras. Every genre, every era, every week after newsletter promotion There's something slightly strange about hearing the reconstituted Stereolab in 2025: for all that Instant Holograms on Metal Film harks back to the music they made 30 years ago, it feels weirdly current. Perhaps that's because they were always at one remove from everything else – it doesn't evoke a specific past era – or perhaps because Stereolab have exerted at least some influence over pop since their initial split, hailed as an inspiration by everyone from Deerhoof to Tyler, the Creator, the latter claiming 'they shaped my sound'. (There also exists a video online in which Pharrell Williams describes why their 1997 track The Flower Called Nowhere is the best music to be fellated to in dispiriting detail, but the less said about that the better.) Or perhaps it's because Sadier's lyrics feel less marginal or left-field than they once did. You really didn't get a lot of Marxist-influenced critiques of late-stage capitalism during Britpop: today, the notion that an addiction to growth might pose an existential threat to humanity has been mainstreamed. Likewise the rise of social media has made rather a lot of situationism's ideas about spectacle seem more pertinent than ever. 'The goal is to manipulate / Heavy hands to intimidate / Snuff out the very idea of clarity / Strangle your longing for truth and trust,' sings Sadier on Melodie Is a Wound. On the one hand, that's very much Stereolab being Stereolab. On the other: she can say that again. Parade – Picking Flowers Eerily atmospheric, occasionally discordant, ultimately rather beautiful, touching on post-rock, jazz and acoustic singer-songwriter modes along the way: a strange, and fascinating debut by the London band.
