As we noted back in April, the return and resurgence of Ladytron is one of the best subplots of 2019. Earlier this year the influential electronic-pop group released their sixth album, a dystopian-themed self-titled affair that not only served as the follow-up to 2011’s Gravity The Seducer, but also a call-back to the band’s early-’00s relevance, when the Liverpool synth quartet dropped a unique beat on a landscape riddled with garage rock.
Tracks like “The Island” and “The Animals” display both an urgency and confidence not seen from Ladytron in more than a decade, and now, we’re set to hear these songs — and the band’s dynamic catalog of indie dance floor crushers — when they play Boston’s Royale tonight (October 3).
“We’ve been away for so long; it’s been like seven years or eight years,” vocalist and songwriter Helen Marnie told Paper. “[So] I wanted to write something that wouldn’t scare people away, but also leaned on what Ladytron was good at and how we were before, but maybe introducing something a little bit different. I think ‘The Island’ harks back to earlier Ladytron when we first started, right about 2002, 2003. I wanted it to be a bit more pop, but not pop in that cheesy sense of the word. That’s why we’ve got high synths, arpeggiated synths, and things like that.”
Tonight, we’ll all transport back about 15 years or so, but a reminder that we’re still living in the now will be all around us.
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