Following on from the release of their first studio album in 15 years this year, Stereolab return with two brand new songs ‘Fed Up With Your Job’ and ‘Constant And Uniform Movement Unknown’ recorded during the 'Instant Holograms On Metal Film' sessions.

The limited double A-side 7” contains two brand new tracks not available on any other physical formats.

TRACK LISTING

1. Fed Up With Your Job
2. Constant And Uniform Movement Unknown

'Instant Holograms On Metal Film' is the first Stereolab album in 15 years, featuring 13 new studio recordings. Played by Laetitia Sadier, Tim Gane, Andy Ramsay, Joe Watson and Xavi Muñoz, with contributions from Cooper Crain and Rob Frye of Bitchin Bajas, Ben LaMar Gay (composer/jazz multi instrumentalist), Holger Zapf (Cavern of Anti Matter), Marie Merlet (Monade) and Molly Read among others.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: I'm obviously used to seeing Stereolab crop up on the reissue lists, but it's been FIFTEEN YEARS since a new album has hit, leaving 'Instant Holograms On Metal Film' a much needed new entry to their canon. Soaring 50's tropicalia, snappy jazz-adjacent electronics and woozy ghostlike vocals meet snappy disco grooves and rolling basslines. Further evidence, if any were needed that they're still one of the greatest acts to have dabbled in an oscillator.

TRACK LISTING

1. Mystical Plosives
2. Aerial Troubles
3. Melodie Is A Wound
4. Immortal Hands
5. Vermona F Transistor
6. Le Coeur Et La Force
7. Electrified Teenybop!
8. Transmuted Matter
9. Esemplastic Creeping Eruption
10. If You Remember I Forgot How To Dream Pt.1
11. Flashes From Everywhere
12. Colour Television
13. If You Remember I Forgot How To Dream Pt. 2

Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements is Stereolab’s breakthrough album, their major label debut, and one of the most innovative releases of the 1990s, a musical decade signified by breaking down artistic barriers. Originally released in August 1993, Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements builds on the promise of the band’s early releases Switched On and Peng! by expanding the scope of their highly distinctive mix of one-chord Krautrock grooves, distorted vintage keyboard noise and Euro-pop. Adding touches of ’50s and ’60s easy listening, exotica and space-age sounds as well as samba and French pop, Stereolab did more than any group in the modern rock era to expand the language of art music by incorporating styles left for dead by the serious rock community.

Among the highlights is the fluid and lush opener “Tone Burst” with its layers of whirring analog synths, trance-inducing rhythm guitar and balanced motorik beat. The closing track, “Lock-Groove Lullaby” inverts those same elements to bring the album full-circle. Songs like “Analogue Rock,” “Our Trinitone Blast” and “Pack Yr Romantic Mind” experiment with more complex and adventurous structures. However, “Jenny Ondioline” is still the head-turner: a hypnotic, 18-minute-long tower of a song that checks all of the boxes for what the band had done up to then and points at everything they would do moving forward. Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements remains

Stereolab’s most eclectic and experimental early release and also hints at the evolution that lead them to indie-rock stardom.

This new edition utilises the same remasters as the 2019 expanded album edition, cut from the original 1/2" tapes by Bo Kondren at Calyx Mastering and overseen by Tim Gane, but without any of the bonus material from the 3LP version.

TRACK LISTING

1. Tone Burst
2. Our Trinitone Blast
3. Pack Yr Romantic Mind
4. I’m Going Out Of My Way
5. Golden Ball
6. Pause
7. Jenny Ondioline
8. Analogue Rock
9. Crest
10. Lock-Groove Lullaby

Mars Audiac Quintet saw Stereolab beginning to shed their experimental tendencies in favor of a post-modern space-age pop. The album exudes a sophisticated cool and catchiness that helped them gain new fans while straddling the line between their experimental-rock brethren and the ascending class of premillennial British pop. It’s also the album that put them on the A-list of underground rock bands. Arguably the band’s most accessible album, Mars Audiac

Quintet not only features gentler textures than any of its predecessors, but also more upbeat and hooky songs such as “Ping Pong” (the first Stereolab song to receive widespread video and alt radio airplay) and “L’Enfer Des Formes,” not to mention groove-dominated tracks like “Outer Accelerator” and “Transona Five.” The album is layered with a sensual and beguiling vibe, bringing the allure of lead vocalist Laetitia Sadier to the forefront. The hints of exotica and lounge music on Transient Random-Noise Burst With Announcements are now fully explored on the mellow, marimba-driven album closer “Fiery Yellow” (featuring major contributions from The High Llamas’ Sean O’Hagan). The bubblegum pop of “Wow and Flutter” exhibits the earliest example of the band’s Krautrock stylings being overpowered by an ingratiating melody. Mars Audiac Quintet is one of Stereolab’s most complete attempts at bridging experimental rock and retro-pop. Future releases were at times more cerebral or more poppy, but rarely again were the two simultaneously so perfectly realized.

This new edition utilises the same remasters as the 2019 expanded album edition, cut from the original 1/2" tapes by Bo Kondren at Calyx Mastering and overseen by Tim Gane, but without any of the bonus material from the 3LP version.

TRACK LISTING

1. Three-Dee Melodie
2. Wow And Flutter
3. Transona Five
4. Des Etoiles Electroniques
5. Ping Pong
6. Anamorphose
7. Three Longers Later
8. Nihilist Assault Group
9. International Colouring Contest
10. The Stars Our Destination
11. Transporte Sans Bouger
12. L’Enfer Des Formes
13. Outer Accelerator
14. New Orthophony
15. Fiery Yellow

Stereolab’s fourth full-length, Emperor Tomato Ketchup marked the point where the band evolved from a purely underground phenomenon to an important pop group capable of selling albums while keeping their hipness and integrity intact. At the time of its release, it was simultaneously their most experimental and most accessible release, with the deliberate raw textures of earlier works replaced by a more polished vibe. The album was also their greatest success to date both commercially and critically, and remains a consensus favorite even now.

Continuing to mine the music of the ’60s and early ’70s, Stereolab employs Farfisas and Moogs, melodies from Bacharach and Hardy, soft-rock, bubblegum, dub and hip-hop sounds to augment their core influences of krautrock, punk, jazz and space rock. Odd time-signatures and deft layering techniques are more crucial to the arrangements, and the grooves on tracks like “Metronomic Underground” and “Les Yper-Sound” add a level of funk to the mix, while the album also includes clear and catchy pop songs like “Cybele’s Reverie” and “The Noise of Carpet.” Emperor Tomato Ketchup brings many elements to the table, but Stereolab puts them all together into a coherent vision. It’s hard to say if the album’s greatest accomplishment is making pop music palatable to experimental listeners or introducing pop listeners to the group’s experimental influences.

Either way, it’s one of the most enjoyable and important albums of the ’90s. “Stereolab released countless singles, EPs, and full-lengths during the 1990s, but Emperor Tomato Ketchup remains their most definitive and recommended statement. For a group that reveled in resurrecting Continental obscurity, from Neu! to Krzysztof Komeda, Emperor Tomato Ketchup sounded wholly futuristic and alien.” —Pitchfork

This new edition utilises the same remasters as the 2019 expanded album edition, cut from the original 1/2" tapes by Bo Kondren at Calyx Mastering and overseen by Tim Gane, but without any of the bonus material from the 3LP version.

TRACK LISTING

1. Metronomic Underground
2. Cybele’s Reverie
3. Percolator
4. Les Yper Sound
5. Spark Plug
6. OLV 26
7. The Noise Of Carpet
8. Tomorrow Is Already Here
9. Emperor Tomato Ketchup
10. Monstre Sacre
11. Motoroller Scalatron
12. Slow Fast Hazel
13. Anonymous Collective

On February 28, 2025, Stereolab are making seven of their studio albums available again as 2LP editions. These utilise the same remasters as the 2019 expanded album editions, cut from the original 1/2" tapes by Bo Kondren at Calyx Mastering and overseen by Tim Gane, but without any of the bonus material from the 3LP versions (which have now been discontinued), the idea being to make more cost-effective versions of these sought-after titles available to fans and shops. Each record comes housed in a single 5mm printed sleeve with printed inner sleeves, and a protective PVC outer bag.

TRACK LISTING

1. Fuses
2. People Do It All The Time
3. The Free Design
4. Blips Drips And Strips
5. Italian Shoes Continuum
6. Infinity Girl
7. The Spiracles
8. Op Hop Detonation
9. Puncture In The Radax Permutation
10. Velvet Water
11. Blue Milk
12. Caleidoscopic Gaze
13. Strobo Acceleration
14. The Emergency Kisses
15. Come And Play In The Milky Night

Recorded in Chicago with John Mcentire and Jim O'Rourke on production duties."Sound-Dust" has it's darker and more impressionistic side but this is a more approachable and upbeat sound that shifts back towards the warmer tones and melodic textures of "Dots And Loops", and "Emperor Tomato Ketchup".

This new edition utilises the same remasters as the 2019 expanded album edition, cut from the original 1/2" tapes by Bo Kondren at Calyx Mastering and overseen by Tim Gane, but without any of the bonus material from the 3LP version.

TRACK LISTING

1. Black Ants In Sound-Dust
2. Space Moth
3. Captain Easychord
4. Baby Lulu
5. The Black Arts
6. Hallucinex
7. Double Rocker
8. Gus The Mynah Bird
9. Naught More Terrific Than Man
10. Nothing To Do With Me
11. Suggestion Diabolique
12. Les Bons Bons Des Raisons

Stereolab's music is so consistent, and so consistently pretty, that it has become nearly criticism-proof; the band do what they do so completely that it's almost a matter of accepting or rejecting their music whole instead of analyzing it. But while Stereolab's mix of '50s and '60s lounge, vintage electronic music, and Krautrock may have crossed over into easy listening indie pop a few albums ago, they still can't be dismissed easily. Margerine Eclipse, the band's tenth full-length, can sound a bit like a collage of pieces from their nine other albums, but the overall effect is more retrospective than repetitive. It's arguably the most direct work Stereolab have done since Emperor Tomato Ketchup (and at just under 54 minutes, it's one of the shortest of their later albums) and it continues Sound-Dust's trend of gathering the sounds the band explored on their previous work and tweaking them slightly.

This new edition utilises the same remasters as the 2019 expanded album edition, cut from the original 1/2" tapes by Bo Kondren at Calyx Mastering and overseen by Tim Gane, but without any of the bonus material from the 3LP version.

TRACK LISTING

1. Vonal Declosion
2. Need To Be
3. Sudden Stars
4. Cosmic Country Noir
5. La Demeure
6. Margerine Rock
7. The Man With 100 Cells
8. Margerine Melodie
9. Hillbilly Motobike
10. Feel And Triple
11. Bop Scotch
12. Dear Marge

Dots and Loops is Stereolab’s fifth studio album and the first to completely ditch the motorik drone that had been a trademark since their inception; predominated by lush lounge and jazz textures, it showcases the band’s most complex set of rhythms yet. Stereolab is aided by members of The High Llamas (like-minded travelers in the production of whimsical ’60s sounds), Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma of Mouse on Mars, and John McEntire of post-rock pioneers Tortoise.

The album was recorded in Chicago and Düsseldorf and bridges a unique American-Euro influence. The new rhythmic approach separates Dots and Loops from the band’s previous output, as does a Beach Boys influence which adds to the band’s standard brand. Bossa Nova and ’60s Euro pop are still major touchstones and give the album a deceptively light vibe; however, further listens reveal an elaborate work, with almost every track featuring odd time-signatures and more complicated and layered arrangements.

“Parsec” is space-rock meets drum and bass; “Brakhage” marries a minor key bass line to clinking vibes and a shuffling beat; the segmented, 20-minute “Refractions in the Plastic Pulse” is sunny and appealing, yet intricately constructed.

The dividing line between the band’s first phase and what would be its more experimental latter period, Dots and Loops is the type of album that reveals its charms over many listens and is the one Stereolab aficionados point to as the band’s best work.

This new edition utilises the same remasters as the 2019 expanded album edition, cut from the original 1/2" tapes by Bo Kondren at Calyx Mastering and overseen by Tim Gane, but without any of the bonus material from the 3LP version.

TRACK LISTING

1. Brakhage
2. Miss Modular
3. The Flower Called Nowhere
4. Diagonals
5. Prisoner Of Mars
6. Rainbo Conversation
7. Refractions In The Plastic Pulse
8. Parsec
9. Ticker-tape Of The Unconscious
10. Contronatura