Fifteen years may have passed since Stereolab’s last album, but no amount of time – or retro-futurist aesthetics – can keep the Groop’s music from feeling pertinent. Instant Holograms on Metal Film, the follow-up to Not Music, airs out the despondent mood that record left fans with in all its tight propulsion, and even some of the headiness that has marked their whole career. Intuitive as it always feels, their approach seems to react first to the identification of a structural issue: “The goal is to manipulate/ Heavy hands to intimidate/ Snuff out the very idea of clarity/ Strangle your longing for truth and trust,” Laetitia Sadier sings. So Instant Holograms, as unmistakably and engagingly Stereolab as its predecessor, leans into more humanist impulses, resulting in one of their most open-hearted, forward-looking, and essential collections to date.

1. Mystical Plosives

A bubbling synth is sequenced over a slightly nervier one in this brief instrumental, signalling an ascent before the groove is locked in.

2. Aerial Troubles

“The numbing is not working any more, an unfillable hole,” Laetitia Sadier proclaims in the first lines of the album. So the possibilities start spinning out, with her bandmates helping to articulate the existential dead end. Undefined as the future may seem, the band has fully kicked into gear, marching towards it. 

3. Melodie Is a Wound

The song is curiously titled given that Sadier carries the melodic weight of the song, singing alone this time; yet every element of the song strings it along, mesmerizing all the way through its nearly 7-minute runtime. Just when you think the whole thing’s about to disintegrate, the band picks itself back up, complicating the arrangement as a means of sustaining it. It ponders whether “truthfulness has fallen in desuetude,” which is a mouthful, but the group stretches the question mark more than anything.

4. Immortal Hands

Airier and more open-hearted, ‘Immortal Hands’ fashions a satisfying funk groove around the halfway point, landing somewhere between futurism and retro.

5. Vermona F Transistor

The narrator seems to stick to the role of cultural observer, but ultimately takes matters into her own hands: “I’m the creator of this reality – not the joker who pretends a god to be.” The song lights up with Rob Frye’s saxophone and flute, while Australian-British songwriter and producer Molly Read, the late Mary Hansen’s niece, colours it with “special guest backing vocals.” 

6. Le Coeur Et La Force

The rhythm section is kept minimal, letting the enchanting, carefully structured multi-part harmonies breathe. Frye’s saxophones one again act as a foil, climbing up for a stunning view. 

7. Electrified Teenybop!

Now’s the time for Andy Ramsay’s to get forceful; the synths to squiggle; distortion and phaser applied all over the guitar. Exclamation mark warranted!

8. Transmuted Matter

Over twinkling mallet and graceful bass, Sadler splits the difference between steady resolve and heavenly transcendence; or, in her words, “fully human fully divine, entwined.”  “What do you see through the eye of the heart?” she asks, giving us a taste of the answer through melody alone.

9. Esemplastic Creeping Eruption

The title points to one of the album’s most cerebral and knotty tracks, which rings true, yet it’s also one of the most cathartic. While Sadler’s diction has hardened, spiritually it’s in the same wavelength as the more direct ‘Tansmuted Matter’, speaking of the “exploration of inner world.” Another line, “Not perfection but wholeness,” seems to align with Stereolab’s MO. To the “dark immanence” she recognizes early on, Sadler resolves, “I will abide,” her male counterparts reminding her of the light at the other end. It’s enough to prompt the listener to stick around for a few more tracks. 

10. If You Remember I Forgot How to Dream Pt.1

Sadler sings of “dissolv[ing] into longing,” yet the track is tight and poppy, far from the album’s more ethereal wanderings. “It’s because I am you, it’s because you are me,” she repeats, and naturally the song is split in two; halfway between embodying and breaking the “mirage of separateness.”

11. Flashes From Everyone

The synergy between the musician’s is most palpable on ‘Flashes From Everyone’, which is fitting, given how it drives home the point of unity – a historic theme, blurred, it seems with the more personal “longing to reunite.” The track is rich and kaleidoscopic, a journey that feels, if not exactly complete, then wholly true.

12. Colour Television

A song called ‘Colour Television’ on a Stereolab record titled Instant Holograms on Metal Film – you bet there’s no commentary on social media, AI, or the internet at large here. Yet the imposition of “universal narrative of progress and development and of civilisation,” naturally, still feels pertinent. But the group jams for long enough to arrive at a less dour conclusion: “Open are the possibilities!” 

13. If You Remember I Forgot How to Dream Pt.1

If you had to describe the intent behind Stereolab’s reunion, you might go with “explore without fear the rhizomic maze,” the opening line of the final track on their new album. This part is about remembering, affirmation, embodiment, and “the power to CHOOSE.” The phrase “soften into longing” feels truly at home here, the instruments rippling out and voices joining together.