When Ladytron wrapped their Light & Magic 20th anniversary reminiscences by tweeting, “The next message you get from us will be from the future. We promise”, they meant it quite literally. A couple weeks ago, they revealed their plans for their seventh album – Time’s Arrow will be out on January 20 of next year – as well sharing the audio for the album opener, “City Of Angels”.
They’ve now shared the official visuals for the song – it’s a short film, thanks, not a video, grok the poster – with the requisite amount of moodiness and creepiness to justify a Hallowe’en timing and describe it as follows:
Shot in the concrete mansion of brutalist architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha, and starring actress Bianca Comparato of sci-fi drama 3%, ‘City of Angels’ follows a photographer entranced and confronted by a mysterious force.
@LadytronMusic
Directed by Manuel Nogueira.
Comparto had this to say about starring in the video:
I’m such a fan of Ladytron—I was lucky enough to be in the music video…the whole experience was a dream come true.
Bianca Comparto
Ladytron Share Cinematic Video for “City of Angels” @ Under The Radar
As for the song and the album as a whole, they offered the following in the original press release:
City of Angels is their first new music released since 2019. Over Ladytron’s insistent analogue backing, the song inverts sensuous imagery into a vision of a near future with a 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.
Ladytron
