Beauty, disposability and fragility of the culture that surrounds us, and the exhilaration of freeing yourself from those structures… these are the themes Ladytron return to on Time’s Arrow, their seventh album.

Driven by analogue synths, distorted chimes and hallucinogenic soundscapes, Ladytron crash-landed into electroclash at the turn of the century, using the dancefloor as a bridgehead to the collective unconscious.  On Time’s Arrow the group add new richness, distant shimmers and a shoegaze-adjacent glow with Helen Marnie and Mira Aroyo’s trademark understated voices now inhabiting a space somewhere between cloudscape and dream. 

 

Central to it all is the title – and closing – track ‘Time’s Arrow’, a meditation on the paradox that life must be lived forwards but can only be experienced in retrospect.  As explored in fiction by Isaac Asimov and Martin Amis, the arrow of time drags us along in its slipstream: “Time’s arrow glides through your heart,” Mira sings. The conceit of electronic music has always been that if perfection is achieved, time will somehow stop. Time’s arrow must be obeyed.” “When that song came in,” says Daniel Hunt, “it was obviously the title track. It encapsulated everything else.”

The mood of Time’s Arrow is strangely optimistic, freeing – utopian, even. Have they left dystopia behind? “We are already the,” Helen Marnie points out

 

 

“When I was writing lyrics I was drawn to the idea of dreaming.” Helen describes. “You’re surrounded by this bizarre world and I didn’t want to think about it. The themes here aren’t necessarily joyful or happy. They can be really quite dark – but we wanted to present it in a dreamlike, even uplifting fashion.”

Time’s Arrow summons up images of America’s West Coast in ‘City of Angels’ and ‘California’ but not the paradise you might think. “It’s about the collapse of cultural memory, it’s about forgetting,” says Daniel, “…how fragile it is”. “It’s not about one particular place or other, but a merging of them.”

 

UK TOUR DATES 2023

10th March, GLASGOW, SWG3

11th March, LIVERPOOL, Camp & Furnace

12th March, LONDON, Koko

 

Since forming in Liverpool in the late 90s and taking their name from the gloriously blank Roxy Music track, Ladytron have grown at ease with being distributed around the world. Helen Marnie in the North East of Scotland. Daniel Hunt in Brazil. Reuben Wu now resides in Chicago, where he works in photography and visual arts. Mira, who lives in London with her daughters and makes documentary films for the BBC and Netflix, sees songs as moving landscapes and scenes, as if glimpsed, half consciously, from a train window. “I think some of the songs on this album were inspired by the fleeting nature of time and are about living in the moment – being aware of it and somehow bottling it. Music often comes before lyrics when we write, but I think we all keep a stash of lyrical ideas, images, kind of like a photo album made of phrases. So in a way they do come from personal experience and the emotional response to a very particular moment in time.”

 

They had assembled for shows and to record the first new music for the album in February 2020. Helen and Daniel traveled up to Mogwai’s Castle of Doom studio in Glasgow, where they squeezed in three days of recording while they still could. Daniel remembers Helen picking him up from the studio to go for a drink as recording was finally abandoned in the face of the unfolding crisis. Abba’s ‘Dancing Queen’ was playing in the car. “I shook my head. We both said nothing. Eventually I asked “are you getting that?” “Yes.” “We felt like we were in the opening five minutes of the film. It was dark.” From a Finnieston bar they sat watching oblivious wandering souls outside the window. “…it was so eerie. Nobody knew how bad things were about to get.”

To complete Time’s Arrow, ideas were sent across continents, and songs coalesced. They wrote, worked, and finally reconvened to finish the album in February 2022. Of all bands, Ladytron are used to working apart. “We’ve lived in different countries for years now, but when we come together we just get back into our roles,” Marnie notes.

 

Mira elaborates: “In a way Ladytron has always operated like a jigsaw and that’s what has always made it easier to bring in fresh ideas. We look for like-minded souls to collaborate with too – getting on and coming from a similar mindset, sharing a similar kind of subversive attitude and humour is as important than bringing in a specific sound.” The record was completed with the help of longtime collaborator Daniel Woodward in their original home of Liverpool, along with Tony Doogan and Jonny Scott in Glasgow, and Vice Cooler and Dave Pensado in California.

Fittingly, Time’s Arrow arrives as another moment from Ladytron’s past returned, as the tides of the digital ocean moved in mysterious ways. In mid-2021, users of TikTok began to notice a recurring refrain on the site’s lip sync videos: “They only want you when you’re seventeen/When you’re twenty-one, you’re no fun.”

Disaffected teens denizens of the hyperfast, hyperreal, worldwide video community had stumbled upon words that spoke for – and through – them. Words that captured how a merciless connected world commodifies, consumes, sexualises and spits out the youth that sustains it. Some 200,000 clips were created, many of them with millions of views each. Those words came from a twenty-year-old song by a group whose very existence predated social media itself: electronic pop quartet Ladytron.

 

They had no idea that ‘Seventeen’, from their 2002 album Light&Magic, had found a new audience until the song began appearing in the top 10s of streaming platforms. “It happened without us lifting a finger. When we recorded ‘Seventeen’ we obviously had no concept that twenty years later it would resonate in such a way. It’s like the song had become self-aware. It wasn’t even ours anymore.” remarks Daniel.

 

The original idea was, he explains, “….to make the absolute simplest song imaginable. To distill this down to just two lines. In retrospect it was perfect for this.”

 

“A lot of our fans have been there from the very beginning,” adds Helen, “and they still want us to keep creating. With Time’s Arrow it was like, we need to get this out.”

 

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.  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”.

 

The short film which closed the eponymous album cycle began with a prescient message, taken from British 1970s TV serial Sapphire and Steel, via the late Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life; “There’s no time here. Not anymore”. The video’s director Manuel Nogueira again collaborates with a new clip for single ‘City of Angels’, starring actress Bianca Comparato of Netflix science fiction drama 3%.

 

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.