Any moment is an excellent one for new music from the long-running retro-avant pop band Stereolab, but Instant Holograms on Metal Film, Stereolab’s first full-length since 2010’s Not Music, is particularly well-timed. Blending gliding grooves, wowing-and-fluttering synthesizers, and lyrics that elegantly pine for more, Stereolab’s music blisses out without tuning out. Their eleventh album’s first lyric, which arrives over the elegiac opening chords of second track “Aerial Troubles,” declares, “the numbing is not, it is not working anymore”; it then hairpin-turns into a dance-ready beat, implicitly declaring that the best way to counter any obliteration-worthy despair is to create, and to create movement as well.

Instant Holograms on Metal Film is an hour of prime-grade Stereolab. Precisely crafted pop gems like the vibey “Transmuted Matter,” an abstracted love song with a wordless breakdown that breathes life into its notions of the divine, flow into hypnotic instrumentals like the whirling “Electrified Teenybop!” and stretched-out jams like the forceful “Melodie Is a Wound.” That track, one of the album’s high points, opens with a crash course in media literacy — “The goal is to manipulate/Heavy hands to intimidate/Snuff out the very idea of clarity,” vocalist-songwriter Laetitia Sadier muses over a persistent beat — before veering off into an ever-murkier quadrant of space, the music’s increasing speed and intensity seemingly trying to outpace the malevolent forces of disinformation.

- Rolling Stone