Stereolab was one of those bands that I loved but never thought I would get to see live. I had a chance once, when they came to LA in 2008, but I couldn’t find anyone to go with me — something that I wouldn’t let stop me today. The very next year, they announced that they would be going on an “indefinite hiatus,” so I figured I could probably forget about that one, and for several years, I pretty much did. Then, ten years later, I was thrilled to hear that they were suddenly back and touring again, but global health crises and my own poor planning conspired to keep us apart until the Fall of 2023, when they suddenly disappeared again. So, imagine my surprise and delight a couple weeks ago when I heard that they were about to release a new album, Instant Holograms on Metal Film, their first in 15 years, and that they would be coming to Hamburg for one of their first shows to promote it! Finally I would have my chance!

Gruenspan is a large club in a converted movie theater on Hamburg’s famous Große Freiheit, located directly between the Indra Club, where The Beatles first played when they came to Hamburg, and The Kaiserkeller, where they played more nights than anywhere else except for the Cavern in Liverpool. Founded in 1968, Gruenspan doesn’t quite have the legacy of its neighbors, but if feels like what legacy it does have has also been somewhat less squandered, and the venue, with its immense interior space, charming little lounge area, and original psychedelic murals by local artists Dieter Glasmacher and Werner Nöfer, still feels alive with the optimistic spirit of its own countercultural history in a way that they others, at least for me, never have.

I arrived there last night just before 8:00, the time written on my ticket, and was shocked to find that a band was already performing! And then I was even more shocked by the band! Way back in 1996, Stereolab’s Tim Gane said in an interview with Peter Shapiro, “My favourite music is music which I can't tell if it's good, bad, what it is... ,” and that is definitely the vibe I was getting as I gradually began to absorb what was happening on stage. There was, for lack of a better term, a fifties guy in a grey suit and pink shirt, playing a Stratocaster with Duane Eddy twang, along with two long-haired metal-headish guys on bass and drums. In front of them was a woman with her dark hair in a tight bun, wearing black leather pants and a white “librarian” blouse with black trim — set to maximum buttoned-up — and singing with a voice that was somewhere between Lea Thompson in Back to the Future and Betty Boop.

There was something about the extreme low-energy, depressive vibe that was coming off this group that at first struck me as oppressive, then gradually shifted into the surreal, as if I was experiencing one of the musical performances in an early episode of Twin Peaks, but as it really should have been. Gradually, as I got more and more immersed in this experience, it became revelatory, and I was surprised by how much their songs were able to affect me emotionally. One in particular, “Silent Dome,” which I took to be about the anxiety of already having peaked, either in a relationship or in life, struck me as extremely poignant and perfectly suited to the band’s highly individual style. As I later learned, this was Manuela, an Austrian/British wife/husband collab from Glasgow who record on Scotland’s Lost Map Records, and the fifties guy (also the husband) was apparently Nick McCarthy, formerly of the very famous band Franz Ferdinand. Who knew!?

As their set continued, Manuela surprised me yet again by veering dramatically into unpredictable new stylistic directions, most notably including one song near the end with a jerky industrial sounding rhythm that was reminding me very intensely of something, but I couldn’t tell what until it suddenly hit me that it was something from Prince’s Purple Rain era, although I’m still debating myself on whether it was more “Darling Nikki” or “The Beautiful Ones”. Throughout, I had the feeling that I was witnessing a performance that was profoundly and intensely emotional, but somehow out of phase with regular reality. That’s not a feeling that I had ever had at a concert before, so I appreciate it and will definitely keep my eye out for Manuela in the future.

After Manuela closed their set, there was just enough time for me to wander around a little bit and get another beer before a sudden surge of applause let me know that something significant was happening. Before I could make it to a spot where I could see the stage, the club started to fill with the sound of Stereolab: as exciting, challenging, and impossible to imitate as it is familiar and unmistakable.

A common criticism that’s been thrown Stereolab’s way over the years is that all their songs sound the same. I feel like what people actually mean when they say that is that their style is immediately distinctive, which is undeniably true. The sound of Lætitia Sadier’s ultra casual but profoundly beautiful and endearing voice rising above an expertly cultivated bed of undulating sound is something that anyone who’s heard one Stereolab song would be able to identify every time, but I don’t think this is really any kind of criticism against them, especially considering the extreme variety that they’ve managed to squeeze out of that basic brief over the years.

There have also been a few highly noticeable changes to their sound in the three and a half decades that they’ve existed as a band. As someone who was, until recently, mostly familiar with their earlier material, I associate Stereolab with the sound of a distorted electric guitar playing chords in a straightforward beat over the insistent “Motorik” pattern, borrowed from 1970s Krautrock bands like Neu and Can, in the drums, but there was relatively little of that sound on display last night at Gruenspan. Drummer Andy Ramsay, who’s been with the band since 1992, may still often keep the Motorik pattern as a guiding principle, but with considerable variation and expressive fills that buck against any feeling of mechanization or roboticism. Meanwhile Tim Gane, who oddly tends to make mildly derisive comments about R&B music in interviews, now plays his guitar, more often than not, like a disciple of Nile Rodgers, and a funk-tinged upbeat chop (or chuck, as I believe Rodgers calls it) was one of the most consistent features of the performance.

Mary Hansen looks in on Lætitia Sadier and Tim Gane (c. late 90s)

And of course there’s a deeply sorrowful aspect to the change in Stereolab’s sound, as it’s now missing the vocal contribution of Mary Hansen, who was tragically killed in 2002. The blend and playful interplay of Hansen and Sadier’s voices was once a key ingredient in what made Stereolab’s music so intoxicating, and so much fun, to listen to, especially as the 90s wore on and they increasingly rejected the concepts of “lead” and “back-up” singer in favor of a fully polyphonic approach. As far as I’ve been able to discover, they have never made any attempt to find a replacement to fill her role in the band, and I don’t blame them, even though there were several favorite songs that I knew I couldn’t hope to hear in the concert, simply because her role was too essential. It should be noted, though, that Xavi Muñoz, the bass player who’s been with the band since their 2019 reunion, got out his falsetto and pulled off some admirable back-up vocals on several songs, albeit on a much more modest scale.

They opened their set with “Aerial Troubles,” the first single off their new album. It’s a great song that seems to tell the whole history of the band with its alternation between a heavy, plodding A and funky, up-beat B section and its intensely polyphonic melodies, carried by at least three, but possibly even more voices on the record. It also features a message that seems particularly relevant to this historical moment. Sadier sings “The numbing is not [] working anymore,… …Greed is an unfillable hole,” pretty much hitting the nail on the head as far as the current political climate is concerned, but then turns things around for an optimistic parting shot: “The juncture invites us to provide care (Palliative), Dying modernity, While offering antenatal care for the inception, Of the new yet undefined future, That holds the prospect for greater wisdom.”

Those lyrics, and the fact that they can actually work in a pop song, are a great demonstration of one part of the magic of this band. For me personally, as a listener who typically gets to know the musical side of things pretty well before I start to actively engage with the lyrics, a fun part of listening to Stereolab has always been the surprise of suddenly realizing how much pointed political and cultural criticism is hiding behind Sadier’s disarming melodies.

In the past, Sadier often tended to present these criticisms indirectly, even performatively. For example, the first older song they played was “Motoroller Scalatron,” from their 1996 breakout album Emperor Tomato Ketchup, a song named, in classic Stereolab fashion, after the Motorola Scalatron, a microtonal musical instrument invented by George Secor and Hermann Pedtke that featured 240 hexagonally arranged multicolored keys and could play music with up to 56 individually tunable notes per octave, although what, if any, relation it may have to the themes in the lyrics is anyone’s guess. Sadier begins the song by asking the question, “what’s society built on?” She then goes on to provide an answer in alternating echoes of “It’s built on…” with the final word shifting between “bluff” and “trust,” later changing to “words” and “work.” It seems reasonable to take this as some kind of commentary on contradictions in our society, perhaps between espoused ideals and lived reality, but it also leaves enough room for interpretation and potential double meanings to make it difficult to pin down.

By contrast, another highlight from the new album, “Melodie is a Wound,” which Sadier prefaced with “this is a song about the truth,” features the lines “So long, public's right to know the truth, Gagged, muzzled by the powerful, Cultivate ignorance and hate.” Comparatively, this seems to be a more or less straightforward comment on the rise of misinformation and growing global threats to the freedom of the press, albeit somewhat obfuscated by Sadier’s signature unconventional vocal stress. Given the circumstances we’re all dealing with at the moment, I see this turn towards slightly more on-the-nose expression as a sensible move, and frankly, I’m grateful for it. This comeback couldn’t have happened at a better time.

“Melodie is a Wound” begins in a familiar sound space that evokes 60s pop icons like Françoise Hardy and Burt Bacharach, but it takes a turn midway, as Stereolab songs often do, into an extended breakdown section employing materials from the earlier part of the song. Hearing this in a live context, in which volume, distortion, and acoustical chaos act on gradually shifting melodic fragments to create new, sympathetic tones and melodies within a constantly fluctuating harmonic texture, I suddenly understood the oft-repeated comparison of Stereolab with musical minimalists like Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and especially Steve Reich as something more than the somewhat superficial aesthetic resonance that I had previously assumed it to be.

This is one reason why, although I really enjoy their studio recordings, I would highly advise anyone with any interest in Stereolab to see them live. The intensity of their interactions in the moment, combined with the cultivated unpredictability of the sounds themselves just turn their songs into a different and more exciting animal than what you hear on the records. As Gane said in an interview with Rob Harvilla around the time of their reunion in 2019, “It’s just really important that it doesn’t drift into a nice presentable pop tune.” For any band that plays so much with pop sensibilities and aesthetics, this is always a danger, and that danger tends to increase as sophistication in song-writing and studio production increases. I’m very happy to report that there are no nice presentable pop tunes in Stereolab’s live performance.

That’s something that I was at least partly aware of from listening to live recordings. What surprised me more was how much seeing them live did to humanize them. As much as I love Stereolab’s aesthetic, and I really love Stereolab’s aesthetic, there is a certain cold and impersonal quality to their records, but this wasn’t the impression I had from their show at all! Gane basically just seems to be completely in the music and totally focussed on what he’s doing. You get the feeling he would be doing the exact same thing whether the audience was there or not. Sadier, meanwhile, seems to be hyper aware that she’s in front of an audience, and there’s something very endearing about the way she stands just slightly too straight, clinging to a tambourine, or a guitar, as if grateful to have something to do with her hands or indulging in little dances that seem more for her than for the crowd. It all has an effect that somehow feels much closer to watching a friend who’s gotten her courage up to get up on stage, and then just happens to be a super awesome performer, than to anything like the persona of a traditional rock star, although she certainly is a rock star. Also, I just have to mention, at one point during “If You Remember I Forgot How to Dream Pt.1” I looked away just for a moment, and when I looked back, she suddenly had a trombone in her hands, which she proceeded to play to good effect on a couple of songs. I suppose I would have noticed it there before if I’d been more observant, but as it was it completely caught me off guard, and it was definitely one of the most delightful and hilarious surprises I’ve experienced during a concert.

Anyway, this has already gone on longer than I intended, so I’ll just say this. Nobody else can do what Stereolab does, and if what they do appeals to you at all, seeing them do it in person is an experience you need to have. Between now and December 14th they’re scheduled to perform 59 shows in 17 countries, so this might be the best opportunity you’ll have. Do yourself a favor and don’t miss it like I almost did.

-Peter Lawson 29 May 2025

Stereolab with Manuela at Groenspan - 28 May 2025

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