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Electronic pop quartet Ladytron announce their highly anticipated seventh studio album Time’s Arrow, with the brand new single City Of Angels online now. The album, set for release via Cooking Vinyl on 20th January 2023, will be followed by UK tour dates in March.
City of Angels is their first new music released since 2019. Over Ladytron’s insistent analogue backing, the song inverts sensuous imagery into a vision of a near future with a 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. 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 toLadytron’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 is available to pre-order now. Fans who pre-order the album will receive immediate access to a pre-sale for UK shows. General on-sale now.
UK TOUR DATES 2023
10th March,GLASGOW, SWG3
11th March, LIVERPOOL, Camp & Furnace
12th March, LONDON, Koko
Forming in Liverpool in the late 90s and taking their name from the gloriously blank Roxy Music track, Ladytron’s debut album 604 was released a year ahead of 2002’s Light&Magic with Witching Hour in 2005 – “a quantum leap record” said Pitchfork. 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.
Next up was 2008’s Velocifero, before 2011’s more serene, dreamy Gravity the Seducer and then a deserved break which 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 for an album which Q Magazine called “near perfection” with Mojo insisting that in “Dark times, Ladytron soundtrack them beautifully.” GQ described it as “Formidable machine music, full of urgency and menace.” While NPR posited that “Ladytron seems enraptured at the idea of change, and of new beginnings in the face of a possible fiery end.”