Soft was the bird that whispered to the wind
greed will ignite and burn you from within
No not much survives,
Evil the prize
Automatic’s Is It Now? arrives like a sly dispatch wrapped in rhythm. Out September 26 via Stones Throw, the trio of Izzy Glaudini (synths, vocals), Halle Saxon (bass, vocals), and Lola Dompé (drums, vocals) advance their sound with sharper teeth and slyer humour. They believe, as they’ve said often, that the message of change is best carried with a beat that moves hips as well as minds. Here, that idea turns luminous, laced with wit.
The album bends pop brightness into something slyly radical, embedding calls for renewal inside grooves that glitter with tension. Its Trojan horse conceit – sweet surfaces ferrying subversion – works especially well against themes of automated warfare, consumer stupour, and oil’s iron hand over politics. What seems cheerful on the surface masks a deeper unease, a satire shaped for the body as much as the brain.
On Black Box, their newest single, Automatic, plunges into critique with a hypnotic lure. The track borrows the mood of trip-hop and the precision of post-punk, then tilts it toward collapse. Greed, corruption, false victories…all are sketched in stark lines. The lyrics suggest a warning, one of wings burnt away and art cut down by invisible powers. Betrayal looms, deals are dismissed, and the central question lingers: what was the fight even for?
“The title ‘Black Box’ refers to the black box in a crashed plane,” says Glaudini. “The repetitive synth is supposed to suggest a plane gliding as it crashes/ an alarm distress call. I was listening to the Leonard Cohen album The Future a lot around the time the lyrics were written. It’s a pretty straightforward critique of people that have sold out on a large scale, specifically within creative industries. Thierry Mugler said, ‘art used to tell money what to do, now money tells art what to do’ and the world is a less interesting place because of it.”
The video for Black Box, co-directed by Niccolò Verrecchia and Bryce Williams, amplifies the music’s surreal humour. Rendered in stopmotion, Automatic appear as ants in a farm, burrowing through soil only to be chased by a grotesque blob. They surface in a fish tank, a forest on fire, an archaeological dig…images strange, playful, and memorable, calling to mind the Brothers Quay and oddball relics of early internet animation like the off-kilter Spongmonkeys or the absurd Flash chaos of classics like Salad Fingers and Gonads and Strife.
Watch the video for “Black Box” below:
Working for the first time with producer Loren Humphrey, whose credits span Tame Impala to Arctic Monkeys, the trio recorded between New York and Los Angeles, navigating distance and temperament with precision. Their influences stretch wider, nodding to Patrick Cowley, A Certain Ratio, Air, and that late-’70s moment when dub and punk collided with combustible effect. Is It Now? doesn’t posture as prophecy. It prods, provokes, and nudges. You might come away asking sharper questions, or at least dancing until you do.
Since 2022’s Excess, Automatic have shared stages with Tame Impala, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Marías, and IDLES. This fall, they tour extensively with Sextile, before heading to Europe and the UK on their own terms.
Listen to Black Box below and order the single here. Pre-order Is It Now? here.
Pre-order Is It Now?: https://sthrow.com/isitnow
United States
- 25/9: Brooklyn, NY @ Warsaw
- 26/9: Philadelphia, PA @ The Foundry @ The Fillmore
- 27/9: Washington, DC @ Black Cat
- 29/9: Asheville, NC @ The Grey Eagle Tavern & Music Hall
- 30/9: Nashville, TN @ The Blue Room at Third Man Records
- 1/10: Atlanta, GA @ The Masquerade
- 3/10: Dallas, TX @ Studio at The Factory
- 4/10: Houston, TX @ White Oak Music Hall
- 5/10: Austin, TX @ Mohawk (Outside)
- 6/10: El Paso, TX @ The Lowbrow Palace
- 8/10: Phoenix, AZ @ The Crescent Ballroom
- 9/10: Las Vegas, NV @ Swan Dive
- 10/10: San Diego, CA @ The Observatory North Park
- 11/10: Los Angeles, CA @ The Novo
UK & Europe
- 12/11: Brighton, UK @ Daltons
- 13/11: London, UK @ The Lexington
- 15/11: Berlin, DE @ puschenfest
- 17/11: Cologne, DE @ Bumann & Sohn
- 19/11: Metz, FR @ BAM
- 20/11: Paris, FR @ Petit Bain
- 21/11: La Rochelle, FR @ La Sirene
- 24/11: Milan, IT @ Circolo Arci Bellezza
- 25/11: Prague, CZ @ Bike Jesus
- 27/11: Munich, DE @ Milla
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