- This week Liverpool synth quartet Ladytron announced their highly anticipated seventh studio album Time’s Arrow, premiere the lead single "City of Angels" and reveal the album’s tracklist and cover art. The single’s video, directed by Manuel Nogueira will soon follow. The album is set for release via Cooking Vinyl on January 20, 2023 with a UK tour to follow in March. US live shows will be announced soon.

"City of Angels” is their first new music released since 2019’s critically acclaimed eponymous album. Over Ladytron's insistent analogue backing, the song inverts sensuous imagery into a vision of a near future 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 (Nettwerk). 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 to Ladytron’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.

Full Tracklist for Time’s Arrow

City of Angels

Faces

Misery Remember Me

Flight From Angkor

We Never Went Away

The Night

The Dreamers

Sargasso Sea

California

Time’s Arrow

Ladytron UK Dates

March 10th, 2023 - Glasgow, SWG3

March 11th, 2023 - Liverpool, Camp & Furnace

March 12th, 2023 - London, Koko

Ladytron are:

Daniel Hunt

Helen Marnie

Mira Aroyo

Reuben Wu

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, 2008’s Velocifero, before 2011’s more serene, dreamy Gravity the Seducer and the cue for 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”.