Liverpool synth quartet Ladytron have announced their highly anticipated seventh studio album ‘Time’s Arrow,’ and shared the lead single City of Angels. The single’s video, directed by Manuel Nogueira will will be out soon. The album 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.
City of Angels is their first new music released since 2019’s critically acclaimed eponymous album. Over Ladytron’s insistent analogue backing, the song inverts sensuous imagery into a vision of a near future collapse of cultural memory. “It’s about forgetting,” says Daniel Hunt, “…how fragile it is”, “…not about one particular place or other, but a merging of them.”
Beauty, disposability and fragility of the culture that surrounds us, and the exhilaration of freeing yourself from those structures… these are themes Ladytron return to on ‘Time’s Arrow’. Crystalline melodies enveloped in icy textures and rippling arpeggios, shoegaze, disco, and industrial sounds that combine in their signature electro pop style.
The mood of ‘Time’s Arrow’ is strangely optimistic, freeing – utopian, even. Have they left dystopia behind? “We’re already there,” Helen Marnie points out.
Fittingly, ‘Time’s Arrow’ arrives as another moment from Ladytron’s past recently returned, as the tides of the digital ocean moved in mysterious ways. 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, sending the track into top 10s around the world. A new disaffected generation was introduced to Ladytron’s music, with some 200,000 clips created, many of them with millions of views each. A twenty-year-old song by a group whose very existence predated social media itself: electronic pop quartet Ladytron.
As the strange rebirth of Seventeen shows, great work creates its own space. It never dies. ‘Time’s Arrow’ glides through your heart – from the past to the future.
‘Time’s Arrow’ track list
City of Angels
Faces
Misery Remember Me
Flight From Angkor
We Never Went Away
The Night
The Dreamers
Sargasso Sea
California
Time’s Arrow
You can pre-order ‘Time’s Arrow’ here.
Ladytron UK Dates
March 10th, 2023 – Glasgow, SWG3
March 11th, 2023 – Liverpool, Camp & Furnace
March 12th, 2023 – London, Koko
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