Written by Ladytron willed themselves into existence some 25 years ago, writing their names in the residue of icy-hot heroes like Kraftwerk, Soft Cell, and Gina X. They were funny, and they were a little mean, often at the same time, and mean folks often thought they were a joke. With their analog synths and goth affect, they could have disappeared into the mists of novelty nostalgia. Instead, they insisted on brewing up ever-wilder stuff, seizing on the body-blow impact of industrial and shoegaze, the apocalyptic futurism of Detroit techno, the decadence of Italo disco—in a body of work far stronger and stranger than anyone expected. A quarter century in, Ladytron is a band who has Gary Numan opening, who Pet Shop Boys’ Neil Tennant wants to emulate, who made the best songs on a not-bad Christina Aguilera record, and whose echoes can be heard in recent albums from HAAi, Zara Larsson, and even Addison Rae, who is reportedly knocking at their door for a collab. In the 21st century, Ladytron are generational.
For their next trick, they’ve dropped the dark throb that powered 2023’s Time’s Arrow and found something far sunnier. Paradises fades the lasers and the fog machines, to better see that afternoon light angling through the trees. This strategy plays out on songs like “Secret Dreams of Thieves,” in which a deep maze of acid house verses suddenly reveal the fractal pattern of anthemic chorus. “Hearts of fire,” the song goes, unveil natural desires: “They seek the secret life of reeds/Translucent leaves that breathe.” The new mood is somewhere between Adonis and William Blake. “Evergreen” might tell the story of cruising for sex among the pine needles, and its bongo-y wandering, and especially its pitch-shifting ending, really captures that moment of anticipation and attraction when nature seems to obey only its own mysterious rules.
No score yet, be the first to add.
Those needles are sharp as knives—it wouldn’t be a Ladytron record without a thick gloss of goth. “Caught in the Blink of an Eye” sounds effortless, but every bit of it is perfectly placed; its chorus is a shaft in which motes of glitter, pancake makeup, cocaine, and the surface noise of a thousand coldwave 12″s hang like dewdrops in a spiderweb. Stately processions like “In Blood” and “I See Red” unfurl with the rustle and crunch of heavy boots on fallen branches. Often, though, the band drops the hauteur to reveal a surprising kind of kookiness. “Kingdom Undersea” specifies an affable Italo-dub shuffle to build a world “where the metal spires, they tower/And the rhododendrons flower.” In “A Death in London,” a sax sound smears itself all over a wood-block bassline while sunbathers orgasm in a city park. It’s not quite that Ladytron have gone horny, or hippy, but it’s not quite not that either. Anyway, it’s a delight.
Maybe Paradises stayed out in the sun too long. The back half of the album drags a bit, with the organ lines of “Heatwaves” and the martial figurations in “Solid Light” never quite catching spark. Ladytron have found a bright palette of sounds, and they use them all the time on these songs, which makes the return of that wood-block bass on “Free, Free” less interesting. “Metaphysica” tills the album’s familiar soil of handclaps and humanoid choirs, but, with a lack of dynamics and a watery attempt at hypnotism, the track stays muddy.
Still, the band deserves credit for being confident enough to release all this material as a single gesture, rather than back-ending the leftovers into a “deluxe edition” a few months later. Ladytron arrived full-formed all those years ago, but they keep flowering into strange, vibrant forms—like the funky feel-good elders of “I Believe in You,” a disco hall of mirrors in which every reflection finds you, and them, looking their best. “Whatever you are,” Ladytron sing in unison as synths around them crash, “like the magic that’s in me, I believe in you.” They’ve earned their laurels, and Paradises shakes off the dust of the past to find a harvest.
