Ladytron - Ladytron

The Guardian 80

(K7!)

If any band was going to bounce back from years of acrimonious hiatus with a soundtrack to our troubled times, Ladytron seemed unlikely contenders. Yes, that Ladytron, from Liverpool, whose heavy-lidded, robo-cool vocals defined the electroclash movement of the early 2000s and who haven’t released anything since 2011. And yet their eponymous return is an immersive, invigorating and convincingly brooding stomp of disenfranchisement.

Pitchfork 77

A dystopian band for dystopian times, Ladytron return with an angry, pitiless, evil-sounding record whose nihilism presents them as sirens of the apocalypse.

Drowned In Sound 70

However, nearly eight years have passed since the aforementioned Gravity..., and in with the musical landscape changing at a rate of knots ever since, is there a place for Ladytron in 2019? Of course the simple answer is YES. In fact, there's probably never been a better time for them to return.

Nevertheless, an understandable degree of trepidation between releases – not to mention a parting of ways with previous label Nettwerk – left the band unsure themselves whether their fanbase would still care. So last March, the band announced their sixth album was ready to go via Pledgemusic and while fans snapped up the various packages on offer in droves, it also alerted Berlin electronic specialists !K7 to the fact Ladytron were currently without a label.

Eleven months later, Ladytron is finally with us. A record that's undeniably more immediate than its predecessor, as each of its first three singles suggested. If 'The Animals' and 'The Island' heralded a switch back to the more dancefloor friendly vibe as 2002's Light & Magic or third record Witching Hour from 2005, Ladytron is anything but a formulaic exercise. Experimental digressions punctuate the album throughout, such as on the Germanic 'Run' or recent 45 'Far From Home', which takes a more intrinsic journey than its aforementioned predecessors.

As with the band's previous output, vocals are shared between Helen Marnie and Mira Aroyo, and their good cop/bad cop approach works wonders here. Two of Aroyo's lead contributions 'Paper Highways' and 'Horrorscope' stand out as Ladytron's finest moments, not least by way of the political overtones thematic in their lyrics.

Elsewhere, Marnie's 'You've Changed' could be the sonically ambivalent sibling to Lady GaGa's 'Bad Romance', while closing couplet 'The Mountain' and 'Tomorrow Is Another Day' recall Abba's 'The Day Before You Came' and M83 in their Before the Dawn Heals Us phase. At 13 songs it's an eventful ride and one that takes repeated listens to really click but once it does, Ladytron makes all the right noises in all the right places.

With all four members based in different parts of the world right now – Marnie and Aroyo reside in Glasgow and London, while Reuben Wu and Daniel Hunt find themselves over the other side of the world in Chicago and Brazil respectively – it's difficult to predict when or where the next chapter might emerge. Nevertheless, it's great to have them back, and Ladytron is another fine addition to an already impressive body of work.

The Guardian 60

(!K7)

During the 00s, Anglo-Bulgarian synth quartet Ladytron released a string of sublime singles – Seventeen, Destroy Everything You Touch, Ace of Hz – without ever quite managing to release a consistently brilliant album. Their self-titled sixth album, their first since 2011’s Gravity the Seducer, doesn’t buck the trend, sadly.

There’s a directness and urgency its predecessor lacked – in part thanks to the unlikely presence of Sepultura founder Igor Cavalera on drums – but their sound remains unmistakable: strong analogue synth lines and propulsive rhythms topped by Helen Marnie’s and Mira Aroyo’s intertwining deadpan vocals. Ladytron certainly has much to recommend it: last year’s comeback single The Animals is as good as anything they’ve done, Figurine demonstrates their way with a surging melody, and You’ve Changed finds them at their most muscular. But too many of the other songs here drift past perfectly pleasantly, without enough of a hook to snag the imagination. Indeed, the likes of Far from Home and The Mountain disappear from the memory even before the next track starts. For all the promise here, the definitive Ladytron album remains the 2011 compilation Best of 00-10.