Photo Credit: Wendy Redfern
Liverpool synth quartet Ladytron have announced their highly anticipated seventh studio album, Time’s Arrow.
The lead single, “City of Angels”, is their first new music released since 2019’s critically acclaimed eponymous album. The song inverts sensuous imagery into a vision of a near future collapse of cultural memory. Likewise, the general mood of Time’s Arrow is strangely optimistic, freeing, and utopian. Have they left dystopia behind? “We’re already there,” Helen Marnie remarks.
Ladytron examines the themes of beauty, disposability, and fragility of the culture that surrounds us, and the exhilaration of freeing yourself from those structures. The band’s signature crystalline melodies and rippling arpeggios belt out various forms of shoegaze, disco, and industrial sounds.
“It’s about forgetting how fragile it is…not about one particular place or other, but a merging of them,” says Daniel Hunt.
The single’s video, directed by Manuel Nogueira, will soon follow. For now, whet your whistle with this psychedelic visualizer based on the album art.
Last month Ladytron celebrated the 20th anniversary of their formative 2002 LP Light&Magic (Nettwerk). In mid-2021, the album’s single Seventeen went viral on TikTok: a new disaffected generation was introduced to Ladytron’s music…a twenty-year-old song by a group whose very existence predated social media itself.
Forming in Liverpool in the late 90s and taking their name from the Roxy Music track, Ladytron’s debut album 604 was released a year ahead of 2002’s Light&Magic with Witching Hour in 2005. The group were lauded as leaders of the new electro-pop and electroclash scenes then flourishing, and Light&Magic went on to be influential, for both independent and mainstream electronic-pop music which followed.
2008’s Velocifero, before 2011’s more serene, dreamy Gravity the Seducer and the cue for a deserved break that lasted years longer than imagined. Along the way they wrote and produced for other artists, including Lush and Christina Aguilera. The group reconvened in 2019.
Time’s Arrow is set for release via Cooking Vinyl on January 20, 2023, with a UK tour to follow in March. US live shows will be announced soon.
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