Electronic Sound Magazine Issue 99 Zurück Ausgabe

It’s amazing to think that it’s taken us so long to put Ladytron on the cover of Electronic Sound. Brian Eno has been a fan of the band for ages, once describing them as “The best of English pop music”, and it’s very difficult to argue with that. Their new album, ‘Time’s Arrow’, is a case in point.

The Liverpool outfit have embraced the aesthetic of the future since their earliest days, albeit through a retro lens. Their moody, icy, noir-ish electropop has drawn comparisons with a range of classic synth artists, many of them from the post-punk days, but Ladytron have always taken their own path. Stephen Dalton describes them as “cyborgs from another dimension” in our cover story, and when you look back at the utilitarian uniforms they wore when they first started out in 1999, you can understand why.

Some 25 years on, Ladytron have seemingly never been more relevant. They’ve inadvertently found themselves a more contemporary audience in recent times, with legions of disaffected teenagers embracing them on TikTok, railing against the commodification and sexualisation of youth by lip-synching the words to their 2002 single, ‘Seventeen’ (“They only want you when you’re 17 / When you’re 21, you’re no fun”), while performing impromptu dance routines. More than 200,000 clips have been created to date, some of them getting millions of views. As the band’s Mira Aroyo says in our interview, the song appears to have struck a chord in this post-#MeToo era.