Album Review: Stereolab - "Instant Holograms on Metal Film"

Stereolab's first studio album in fifteen years, Instant Holograms on Metal Film sounds so consistently great that it honestly sounds like the band never left. It picks up right where the band left off.

Warp - 2025

Since the 90's, Stereolab have become one of the most consistently great bands in the underground, indie music world. Each album has the band's joyful, infectiously marvelous songs that bleed krautrock, new wave, Brazilian pop, electronica, all while having a vintage sound to that of a fictional band you may hear on a show like The Jetsons. Records like Emperor Tomato Ketchup and Dots and Loops remain to be certified classics while also being some of my favorite records of all time. Backed by the charismatic and charming lead vocals from French singer Laetitia Sadier, Stereolab have a spacey, cosmic sound that takes you to another planet. It's infectious, mesmerizing, and consistently excellent. The music is sweetly vibrant and sometimes lushly melancholic. I can't think of many other bands like them who've achieved this much of a successful legacy. Although they've been on hiatus since 2010, they've released compilation after compilation, full of unreleased tracks from the seemingly endless vault. They're so good that they might as well be new, unearthed albums full of songs that could've easily been included onto nearly any past studio album.

They reunited to tour live six years ago and during that time, I patiently waited for them to release a legitimately new album. And they've finally done it! Instant Holograms on Metal Film is the band's eleventh studio album and their first one in fifteen years, since Not Music back in 2010. In these fifteen years of studio album silence, Instant Holograms picks up right where the band left off. The album sounds so effortlessly solid that it doesn't even sound like they ever left. The production is top notch, the mixing is excellent, and Sadier's vocals haven't missed a beat (she still sounds wonderful from her solo records, especially on last year's Rooting for Love). The songs are infectious with its grooves and guitar licks, shimmering with its retro synths and drum machines. "Aerial Troubles" is a slick lead single that has a head bumping tempo. "Melodie Is a Wound" is the album's best song. At seven minutes in length, it acts as a mini epic, full of twists and turns in its many stylistic progressions. Its peppy synth pop transforms into a jazzy, dreamlike state and it swirls with color.

The moody "Immortal Hands" has one of the best drum machine breakdowns I've heard on a Stereolab track. "Vermona F Transistor" has some incredible fuzzy guitar work. "Electrified Teenybop!" is radiating in its electronic bleeps and bloops, being an instrumental that sounds like it's destined to be soundtracking a colorful, imaginative cartoon about robots fighting intergalactic aliens. "Transmuted Matter" has some beautiful guitar, synthesizers, and marimba (which is welcoming to many a Stereolab song). "Esemplastic Creeping Eruption" has a great post rock groove and vocoder harmonies. "If You Remember How to Dream" parts 1 and 2 are dreamy, peppy and mesmerizing, hence the name of the songs.

If I had to critique anything remotely negative about the album is that it could've been cut a bit. It reaches nearly an hour in length and has songs that mostly range in the four to six minute mark and some songs meander a little with its repeated melodies and textures. I mean in the grand scheme of things, more Stereolab isn't the worst possible thing to have by any means. I think if you trim it a little bit to maybe forty five or fifty minutes, it would be a tighter and more concise listen. Overall, for a new Stereolab album, you could hardly do better than what is on here. No fan should really find that much to complain about. Comeback albums are rarely great in quality and they are typically overshadowed by their past, more superior work. Instant Holograms on Metal Film is a record that can easily be joined with the band's sturdy, reliablely great catalog. It's also one of the better albums you'll hear all year, I guarantee it. If this gets you pumped up for more Stereolab releases to revisit if you're a fan, or releases to discover if you're a newbie, then we should be all welcome for it.

My Rating: 8 / 10

Favorite Songs: "Melodie Is a Wound," "Vermona F Transistor," "Immortal Hands," "Transmuted Matter," "Aerial Troubles"