Walls of marble, limbs of steel
We built it alone
A kingdom undersea submerged in me
That we’d call home
Ladytron have been standing in their own electrical weather system for so long that it’s easy to forget how many musicians crawled out of the lakes they evaporated. Twenty-plus years of voltage, sequencers, glamour, and stoic poise…then, bang: Paradises, arriving March 20th via Nettwerk, finds them kicking the door again like the club never closed and the calendar never bothered to turn.
They teased the faithful with two signals: first, the cryptic drift of I Believe in You, then October’s thumper I See Red. Now they hurl Kingdom Undersea into the fray, a track that moves like a marine engine possessed. Propulsive machine funk, it thunders along with a relentless balearic piano riff dancing on a booming bassline, while vocalists Helen Marnie and Daniel Hunt serve a rare duet; a nautical lament, a riddle of symbols and longing…walls of marble, limbs of steel, with the pair shadowed by a ghostly choir of lovesick Fairlight voices. It’s an icy dark-disco cut shot through with sharp house-piano stabs, the kind of underwater club fever that hits like a rogue current. There’s even a faint trace of Madchester spirit in that piano, like a late-night DJ smuggling contraband euphoria into a submarine.
Kingdom Undersea lands like a periscope rising through impossible depths, aiming straight at a dark house dancefloor glowing somewhere far above the waves. The accompanying clip, “a montage of futuristic glitches, overlays, televisions and static as we watch the band play in a strange room that looks like something out of the future the 1980s believed in,” feels like a transmission from another timeline where Ladytron never took a breath, never paused, never let the machines cool.
The video was shot inside an analogue contraption originally built for those acid-house provocateurs, The KLF. You see Marnie, Hunt, Mira Aroyo, percussionist Peter Kelly, and multi-instrumentalist Andrew Hunt framed inside a maze of glitches, static bursts, overlays, and televisions emitting distorted colour: five figures playing in a room that looks like the future the 1980s hallucinated after too many strobe blasts.
Watch Kingdom Undersea below:
Ladytron’s history hovers like a low voltage. Raised in late-millennium Liverpool basements, briefly miscast as electroclash, they built their own weather system instead, one where cheap keyboards glimmered and pop sounded equal parts machinery and ritual. That haunting climate remains.
Paradises looks ready to strike like a flare in the middle of the ocean; it is an album blazing with ambition, colour, and the kind of emotional voltage this band wires into their sleep. Daniel Hunt steered production while Jim Abbiss handled the mix, and he doesn’t mince words: “When I heard the demos for Paradises, I was truly blown away. The variety in songwriting and arrangements reminded me of Witching Hour, but with its own unique atmosphere, sonics, and attitude.”
Helen Marnie adds, “It was like a homecoming. We just fit. His enthusiasm is contagious, and having that in the room really creates a kind of magic.”
“I wanted to write from that perspective and channel that fun feeling of first working together back in the late ’90s when we had nothing to lose,” adds Mira Aroyo.
Marnie echoes it: “Feeling at ease brings the best out of us, and there was a buzz in the studio about the material that felt new.”
And Hunt explains the speed like someone rediscovering the taste of his own blood: “Every time I went into the studio, I’d come out after an hour with a new track. The key motivation was fun. Everything became fun again…There’s an itch we never scratched, which is that despite our origins in the DJ world, we never actually made a ‘disco’ record. Albeit, ‘disco’ in our context has a somewhat different meaning.”
Fans have always heard fragments of proto-house, early electro, and disco refracted across Ladytron’s catalogue. Paradises pushes that impulse right to the front, letting that foundation become something fresh, unsteady, hungry.
Ladytron will also return to the stage with a limited run of UK shows in 2026. They’ll reemerge in their hometown of Liverpool, followed by dates in Manchester and Newcastle. For more information, go here.
LADYTRON 2026 UK TOUR DATES:
- March 19 – Liverpool, UK @ Arts Club Theatre
- March 20 – Newcastle, UK @ Digital
- March 21 – Manchester, UK @ Gorilla
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