A look back at Stereolab

Through my late teens and twenties, starting in college, Stereolab were one of my favorite bands. I have very strong memories of listening to their album Dots and Loops in the dorms in my freshman year of college, and the album continues to be a favorite of mine. I followed them fairly religiously and their music helped introduce me to German bands like Can, Neu!, Ashra, and Faust. The core of the band was Tim Gane, who wrote the music, and Laetitia Sadier, who wrote lyrics and sang lead vocals.

Their music started out as fairly straightforward pastiche of Neu! and Faust, with some shoegazey guitar fuzz and vocal harmonies inspired by French ye-ye pop of the 60s. It evolved into a sort of hybrid of indie rock and lounge, then full-on into psychedelic space lounge (Dots and Loops and its excellent followup Cobra and Phases Group… fully embody this), then finally uptempo Motown-influenced pop with layers and layers of sparkling production.

Through their entire catalog, one can identify a sort of music nerd’s appreciation and appropriation of musical styles from different eras, paired with low-key vocals and lyrics that are often Marxist (much more than I realized as a teenager) and philosophical.

I saw them in concert in New York in 2008, and in 2009 they announced they were going on indefinite hiatus – but really, they broke up at that point. Their last few releases felt strained and uninspired to me, like they were out of ideas but still had some production chops to show off. But that was that, and I didn’t really keep up with the trickle of back-catalog rarities that their label released later.

But after that, I checked out vocalist Laetitia Sadier’s solo work, as Monade and under her own name. Her work is sort of like a continuation of the Stereolab ethos, with a lot of influences from French pop of the 1960s, but generally more chilled-out and less produced than Stereolab was in the second half of its existence.

In 2019, Stereolab reunited to play some shows, to promote some remastered LP releases of their albums. I haven’t managed to see them play again, but after listening to recordings of some of their recent shows, I went into a full retrospective of their work and looked up interviews and read lyrics that I’d never dug into before. I watched Red Bull Music Academy’s 2015 interview with Sadier as part of this, and that ended up revealing more than I expected.

In the interview Sadier talks about how Tim Gane ran the entire show from a musical perspective, wrote everything, but he couldn’t write lyrics, so he had Sadier write them. But according to Sadier, Stereolab was not a democracy: Gane ran the entire show and Sadier had to fight to have any input on the band’s music or production. Sadier also says that Stereolab did not jam. At all. Production was an assembly-line affair, with each member running through their various parts in the studio for each track.

For a long time I’ve had a sense that Stereolab’s music and lyrics don’t completely meld. Like, Gane’s musical ideas were already fully formed and immutable before the lyrics were written, leaving Sadier to express her own ideas in the same space as – but still isolated from – the music.

Sadier and Gane started the band as a romantic couple and eventually had a child together, but they broke up as a couple in the early 2000s, around the time of the recording and/or release of Sound-Dust, one of the band’s more respected albums. In the RBMA interview, the interviewer asks a leading question implying that Sadier and Gane still have a great friendship, to which she replies “We have something.”

In 2002, the band’s backup vocalist and key member Mary Hansen was killed by a truck in London while cycling. Sadier talks about how close she was with Hansen and how it took her a very long time to deal with Hansen’s death. I feel this event really knocked the wind out of the band, and they never really were able to perform at the same level again. What’s especially weird and poignant is how Margerine Eclipse, the first album that was released after Hansen’s death, is peppy and upbeat throughout (and is very very good) but is full of references to Mary’s passing and tributes to her.

All of Stereolab’s vocal melodies and harmonies up until the point of Hansen’s death (but including Margerine Eclipse) were written for a lead and a backup playing against each other, with lyrics and ba-ba-bas interacting constantly. After Mary’s death, that element was lost, or at least had to be achieved by Sadier recording multiple vocal parts. It really wasn’t the same after that.

So eventually, I presume all of those undercurrents became obvious in the music: specifically in the compilation Fab Four Suture, the album Chemical Chords, and the compilation of loose ends Not Music. All of the interpersonal strain and grief and sorrow were too much for Gane’s effervescent compositions to stand up to.

The 2022 concert recordings sound good, like, the band obviously prepared for them and cared about digging into all eras of their back catalog to create eclectic set lists. But I don’t think there will be more Stereolab studio recordings. Both Gane and Sadier have been open in interviews that the band has been touring to promote the LP rereleases. And that’s okay – Laetitia Sadier has continued on making her own music, and it’s very good. I still really like Stereolab’s music, at least the stuff that spoke to me in the first place, and I’ve been digging their early material more. But it’s okay that there probably won’t be any more of it.