Subscriber Playlist, June 2025: Oscillations From the Space Age Batchelor Pad
Exploring the Groop’s storied and eclectic catalog.
After a too-long absence (15 years!), Stereolab — everyone’s favorite space-age music group — has returned with a new album titled Instant Holograms on Metal Film. Since their formation in 1990, Tim Gane, Lætitia Sadier, and their many collaborators have perfected an eclectic and nigh-seamless blend of classic pop melodies, krautrock rhythms, jazz experimentation, and vintage synth noodling.
The resulting catalog is delightfully timeless in the sense that you can imagine Stereolab’s music playing in both the swingin’ clubs of 1960s-era London and 25th-century discothèques drifting through space. And the band’s lyrics, which include the occasional far-left critique of capitalism and materialism, add a further layer of intrigue, especially when delivered in Sadier’s French coo. (On “Ping Pong,” for example, she sings of capitalism’s dehumanizing cycle: “It’s alright, ’cause the historical pattern has shown/How the economical cycle tends to revolve/In a round of decades, three stages stand out in a loop/A slump and war, then peel back to square one and back for more.”)
At the same time, the group’s catalog is quite extensive — eleven studio albums plus numerous compilations, singles, and B-sides — which can make it difficult for Stereolab neophytes to know where to start. This month’s playlist distills 35 years of music into 22 songs and 100+ minutes, with examples from nearly every stage of the group’s existence.