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Liverpool synth quartet Ladytron announce their highly anticipated seventh studio album Times Arrow will be released on January 20, 2023 via Cooking Vinyl.The first single from the album, City of Angels, released on October 14, 2022, is their first new music released since 2019s critically acclaimed eponymous album. Over Ladytrons insistent analogue backing, the song inverts sensuous imagery into a vision of a near future collapse of cultural memory. Its 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 Times 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 Times Arrow is strangely optimistic, freeing utopian, even. Have they left dystopia behind? Were already there, Helen Marnie points out.Fittingly, Times Arrow arrives as another moment from Ladytrons 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 Lights single Seventeen went viral on TikTok, sending the track into top 10s around the world. A new disaffected generation was introduced to Ladytrons 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.Originating in Liverpool, the band, made up of Helen Marnie, Daniel Hunt, Mira Aroyo and Reuben Wu, earned acclaim by relentlessly pushing boundaries, carving out new sonic and conceptual space and refusing to abide by formula or trend.At the beginning they were known for shows in unconventional spaces, such as disused banks and bowling alleys, and placed emphasis on countries and cities other than their own. Thus the groups international recognition quickly grew playing shows in places where few artists went at that time, such as China and Colombia.Along the way they twice took their primitive electronics to Californias Coachella Festival, on relentless tours across Europe, Asia, North and South America, and were invited to perform with artists such as Bjork, Nine Inch Nails, and for Brian Eno at the Sydney Opera House. Eno remarked in an interview, Ladytron are, for me, the best of British pop music. Theyre the kind of band that really only appears in Britain, with this funny mixture of eccentric art-school dicking around and dressing up, with a full awareness of whats happening everywhere musically, which is kind of knitted together and woven into something quite new.
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