Ladytron on Writer's Block, Scouse House, and Not Competing with the Past

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Today's installment: Ladytron have been personal faves of mine for forever, and last week they released an excellent new album Paradises, an epic stretch of a record that finds the trio getting deeper into dance grooves than they have since the very beginning of their careers. It was a true pleasure to talk to Daniel Hunt about the band's expansive career, his currently residing in Brazil, how this new record came together, and much more. Check it out:

How long have you lived in Brazil?
13 years, actually.

I don't think I have ever talked to anybody for the newsletter who lives in Brazil. How has that been?
I love it. I'd say it's an easy place to live. You have access to things that you'd need to be extremely wealthy to have access to in Europe. I go back to Liverpool all the time. I think the longest I ever went unbroken was, like, two years. I moved here at a slightly odd time, because right now Brazil has this halo effect again. It's now looked at as an example, when basically the world's falling apart. It's a place where things look better, and there's a signifying that Brazilian culture is becoming very very exportable again—films and music winning awards, international recognition, things like that.

Obviously, Brazil has its own problems. I basically moved here just off the back of the previous golden age of Brazil—the late 2000s. By the time I got here, things were starting to go strange, and it was an odd and unsettling time to be here, and that obviously culminated in a fascist presidency. Part of it took its toll, to be honest—but we all carried on, and now the guy's in jail for 27 years. We got through that, and now the last four years have seemed rational, normal, sensible, and reliable—apart from the fact that there was a military coup attempt at the very start.

Since then, things are working, and things are being done rationally. The economy's good. We're enjoying this moment, but unfortunately we have an election this year, so who knows. But I really enjoy it here. You'd be surprised—a lot of people from North America and Europe are moving here now, because they're looking for spontaneity and certain things in their social life that don't seem to exist anymore—nightlife, for example. São Paulo is probably the nightlife capital of the world now. There's so many new things happening. Imagine Berlin in the '90s combined with Milan in the '80s and New York in the '70s. Everything that can exist does exist.

As you mentioned, what we're dealing with in the U.S. and what's also been happening around the world—you look to Brazil 50 years ago or so, and you're like, "Oh, okay, this has happened before."
Yeah, it's hard. It's always tempting to look at another country's situation like a Rorschach test, and the comparisons are never perfect. There are commonalities in terms of the bankrolling of this stuff, but the actual chronology is somewhat different. In some ways, the United States is experiencing elements of what Brazil already did and won over. On the other side, there's something quite terrifying happening there that didn't happen here.

I think that the U.S. middle class are basically shocked now because it's actually touching them. Whereas in Brazil, the poor, the Afro-Brazilians, the indigenous, they'd go, "Hold on, this stuff never stopped for us. It hasn't stopped in 500 years." But I get friends live in the U.S. contacting me and and saying, "What should we do?" I don't really know, to be honest. I can't single-handedly tell you what to do.

What I always say is that the terror element is designed to demoralize for a reason. It's designed to keep you off the streets. It's designed to completely demoralize, demobilize, and disorient you. When we had a soft coup in 2016, I was out in protests. I was getting warned about dictatorship-era laws in which I could get deported for attending. I got tear gassed and kettled, which is a really ghastly combination. You can't move, but they're firing tear gas into the crowd. I escaped from that and found military police with rubber bullet guns pointing right in my chest, about three feet away. I realized what this did to me physiologically. I couldn't look at a crowd of people on the streets for years—and I realized, that's what it's designed to do. It's designed to physically get you away and keep you away.

The press materials suggested that this record came together differently than previous Ladytron records. It's also the longest record you guys have ever made. Walk me through that.
The difference was that normally there'd be a base of accumulated material that we hadn't used yet. This was more of an intense burst, from a cold start in October 2023. By January or February, we had the basis of an album from scratch.

The biggest motivator was fun, to be honest. I don't think that's necessarily surprising, because the last record we were trying to make during the pandemic, which was hell on earth. I went over to record to Scotland to record some vocals with Helen, and then I couldn't go back to Brazil. I was stuck for a month in the UK, it was awful. So we were conscious of wanting to refresh the process a little bit. [Vocalist/synth player Mira Aroyo] said she remembers when we first started [the band], and the fact that there wasn't any context for what we were doing—it was very carefree. This is our eighth album, so there's no way we can pretend that we're starting again. But there was a certain feeling of being unshackled.

It's also the first record since maybe the second one that no outside circumstances have impeded the process of making it. The pandemic was the extreme one. With Witching Hour, we had two labels go bankrupt and the whole thing was all stop-starts. Velocifero, we had some issues with the producer we were working with, so we had to kind of salvage that one—snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, as it were. Gravity the Seducer wasn't so much impeded as it was the fact that we were at the end of a phase—we knew we were about to take a break. The 2019 album, making a new record after a break is always gonna be difficult. There's things that you assume you know how to do through muscle memory, and then you realize you don't, which is quite disturbing. Every time, it felt like there was something in the way of the process. It doesn't mean they're not good records, but this was the first time where it felt like we had an open road.

I went on a complete equipment binge, to be honest. It was frightening, and it was similar to how we began. We were picking up cheap synthesizers for nothing— stuff that's worth thousands of dollars now. But there was a do-it-yourself aspect to what we were doing. We had this this gear, and it was like, "What do we do with it?" Any instrument we've used since the beginning of the band, I wanted to have at least one of those available so that we had this physical record of our process and practice. That's a little bit OCD, but I thought it was important, because we've lost gear along the way. In terms of building a studio, I wanted to have at least the baseline of everything we've ever used—and then that expanded once I got back all the things that I'd lost. There were certain keyboards that I would've never bothered looking at, and I got one or two of those. You just plug one of them in and play for a second, and it's so compelling that I had a tune within an hour, because it was fun again.

I didn't want to go back to this palette of sounds that we've used forever. There's nothing stopping us from using the same stuff. But the actual songwriting, for the most part, was done on different instruments, which suggested different melodies and arrangements. That was a catalyst for how much got done, and how quickly. It's obviously still us, but there's something palpably different about it that people are picking up on, especially if you've heard the whole record now. Most of the people we've spoken to so far have only heard the singles, so I've been addressing that this is a slow reveal. It's such a long album, like you say, that it's not going to make full sense until you until you hear it all. But there's no way that we could've just released this with a single or two, because what's the point of working on something for two years if it's going to evaporate in two days? It feels a lot more human, releasing music this way.

I feel like I've been talking to people a lot lately about acquiring and selling gear, which as you note, can be quite expensive if you aren't careful. I did some work for a musician last year who told me about how, for just one record, he bought a bunch of stuff and then sold it all immediately.
I hear this quite a lot. I'm too much of a hoarder to do that. In the '90s, when I was buying most of it, everything was a leap of faith. You were picking up something for 20 pounds at a flea market and figuring out how to use it independently. There were no tutorials or whatever. I'm so averse to that whole world of didactic YouTubes for everything that exists, with someone talking to like you're a four-year-old about it. I don't have any patience for it.

But things have changed. It's almost the opposite of our philosophy, which was always, "You won't believe this, it was so cheap." At some point in the last 10 years, it became this really ugly, ostentatious thing where people would actually be proud of how much they paid for things. My question is always, what are you going to do with it? Are you going to make music with it, or is it just going to sit there for you to show off to your friends? Modular synthesis is another example of this. What are you actually making with it? If you're just playing around for fun, that's fine. If you want to have it as a setup, whatever. But it feels a bit nerdy, like being a compulsive car mechanic.

It's like that Douglas Adams quote—someone who uses a computer in order to use a computer—I feel the same with the gear compulsion. When I've done it, it's definitely been compulsive, but there was an objective at the end of it, and we got this record out of the process. I do look around the studio and go, "Well, we could just get a bigger house." But some of the things I got were legitimate follies, and they'll have to be sold off somehow because they're never gonna be used. But the whole process was fun.

My biggest issue now is that it's just been so long since I've worked on any new music. My daughter's almost four years old, and she's complaining that I haven't done any more music. She's demanding that I do new music! When we first heard the masters in the car last May, she was going, "Why are you listening to dad's old music?" She'd heard the process of the entire record being written. She danced to the first loops of some of the tracks in the record. She's even got a percussion credit. So it's good to have so-called critics close to home as well. She thinks I'm resting on my laurels here!

You've also said in press materials that this record is more dance-oriented. Obviously, Ladytron's sound was rooted in dance music from the very beginning as well.
The way we started, we were dance music-adjacent. We weren't dance music, but we did a lot of remixes. We were DJs, and we never fit perfectly into dance music, but we were there. After the second album, with touring more, we got more into rock dynamics, even if we were still using drum machines. Since I was a teenager, I always Neu! and things like that, so it was a natural move—but it was a bit of a radical shift from Light and Magic to Witching Hour. But there's certain threads of what we do, and with this record, one thread that went more into the background around the time of Witching Hour is now to the fore again. At the same time, it doesn't sound like Light and Magic or the first album. It almost sounds like our prehistory, in a way—like a record made by a version of us that existed 10 years before.

How we began in Liverpool, I was DJ'ing five nights a week. I had a bunch of parties, I was pretty ubiquitous in those days. We didn't use the word "influencer," we had "tastemaker," so for records that were coming out, I was popularizing them in Liverpool. I was getting sent promos and everything else. This was a little record label at one point as well. But I'd been in various bands and hadn't really done anything. The big turning point was the house producers. In Liverpool, we had our own genre of house music, "scouse house." Cream, the super club, was in Liverpool. It was half a mile from what became my studio, and it was huge. Thousands of people came to the city every weekend to go there. It was massive for the economy of the city. It had a knock-on effect on the more underground parties, because there were just so many people in the city center and some of them would go, "We want something different, we actually don't want to go to the big house club."

You had local producers in these little studios, and they were making scouse house. It was a ready-made local production line, and hanging around with those people and seeing what they did taught me what was possible with self-production. A lot of the things that bands on the underground side spent their time and energy doing wasn't essential anymore. It was possible to basically make a record and then worry about the rest—but making the record was the imperative, not getting your live show together and then trying to capture it in the studio. That was the paradigm shift.

As soon as I realized that, that's when the proto-Ladytron started. I was messing around with a Mac G3 and all this like pirated software, and after I got my head start from these house producers teaching me the basics, I started working with various singers. Because of the people I was learning off of, we were automatically adjacent to dance music, even though it wasn't what we were making. That's in our DNA, it always was, and this record sounds more like how that moment felt. There's more to be learned when you look at the past with how things felt subjectively, rather than how things actually were factually. There's tons of avenues, and you can end up with something that's never been done before.

For me, it's certain records you hear when you're in your adolescence that are future shocks. They turn your taste upside down. One of them was "Manchild" by Neneh Cherry. I would've been about 14 when that came out, and I remember it being this explosion of color, pure modernity. It was a really startling thing, the video was [Jean-Baptiste Mondino] as well. You get a couple of those when you when you're younger. I was very into shoegaze—Lush, etc.—and I remember the day when Loveless came out. There was a little party in a friend of mine's basement, and the DJs had Loveless. It was the first time we'd all heard it, and that felt like, "Hold on. This does feel like a new modernity." That didn't end up becoming one, but I think that Neneh Cherry record did, because that sound became Massive Attack, Björk's Debut, and everything else. But these little moments of subjective modernity don't have names either. There's no name for that kind of production. It's the spaces in between, rather than what happened factually.

Shoegaze is something that's really taken greater hold with younger people in the last couple years. Through different eras of Ladytron, you guys have sat on the intersection of several different types of sound that, in 2026, positions you guys fairly well to sound very current.When it comes to the band's fanbase, have you seen the demographic makeup change at all, or do you feel like your fans are growing older with you?
You've always got to be ahead of your audience, and we've made shifts. And at every point, you've got part of your audience that embraces it, and part of the audience that's still clinging on to the last album. After 25 years, there's no way we can compete with the past. There's no point trying to. The new record cannot compete with the record that someone's been listening to for 25 years, with all the baggage and subjective life experiences attached to it.

I am of the opinion, and so is our manager, that ultimately the new record might be considered our best one when the dust has settled. But you can't compare it to the the moment in 2002 or something, when we were actually zeitgeist-y. We were part of the forefront of this new thing, whether willingly or not. That thing ended up being the blueprint for a new modernity of commercial electro-pop. So we've been at that intersection, and we've seen it in terms of what's going on now.

In terms of our sound being current, that's going to be accidental, because I must admit, I don't listen to a lot of new music. I spend so much so much time on this that I don't have any more time to listen to anything, so it really depends on someone else forcing me to listen to something else. I don't have any set method of discovery in new music. Maybe now, when I have a break because we've done this album, I can actually look at the at the present again. But the last thing I'd do is listen to people who sound like us. Why would I do that? I just detox with reggae. I put Jamaican records on. Also, I live in Brazil, so I'm surrounded by stuff here that has no connection with what we do. Though, to be honest, someone pointed out to me the other day that one of the tracks on the album sounds quite Brazilian, and once they'd said it, I couldn't un-hear it.

Sometimes that stuff sneaks its way in, and sometimes people find it difficult to understand that the influences are subconscious. You're not forcing something, you end up doing things instinctively and then you step back at some point and go, "Wait, what have we got there?"

You talked earlier about the rarity of making a record unencumbered by outside circumstances. In general, you guys been making music for quite a long time, and there are moments in artists' careers where they're like,"Is this the end of the road?" I'm curious if you've had any of those moments yourself.
No, not really. But we took that break after Gravity the Seducer, so we basically ended in 2011, halfway through a tour. People didn't know it, but Mira was having her first child. We were playing shows when she was six months pregnant. Some people got it, but we're very private and discreet. We don't live on social media very much, and we don't communicate an awful lot besides what is necessary. Obviously, in the gaps that we leave by trying to be discreet, there's a lot of assumption and misconception that creeps. People were asking, "Why aren't you doing more shows?"

Then I said to Helen, "I think you should go for it with a solo record, we're not going to make a record for a while now." I imagined it was only going to be a few years but it ended up being seven until we released anything else. I produced Helen's first solo record, so we were still working, but Mira was being a mom and Reuben really got into photography. Individually, everyone's got their own stuff going on, and life happens.

The only issue was with the break was that it was longer than we'd intended. That was a hindrance. And then the pandemic, let's be realistic, was completely demoralizing. I basically had writer's block. I hate talking about it now, especially now that we've got this new one out, but we basically started making Time's Arrow a week before lockdown. It was disrupted from the word "Go," and then I was on the plane back to Brazil with "last chopper out of Saigon" vibes. I thought, "I'm gonna go home and we're just gonna work on music, it'll be fine. This is only gonna last a month or so."

When I got home, I couldn't work. I've always been quite prolific once I'm going, And the reason why I couldn't do anything was because I couldn't get past this notion that I've got no idea what world this music is going to be released into. They talk about you always have to have your audience in mind. I don't think we think about our audience when we make the record, but the world—what was it going to look like? We had two versions of what was going to happen. One was this zombie apocalypse disaster movie, and the other one was the dawning of the age of Aquarius. Everything was going to be better, and it was going to destroy capitalism and all of that. Between them, I just saw a completely blank space, and that was the only way I could account for why I couldn't write.

It wasn't until we made a little trip to Liverpool, which was like a little oasis at the beginning of a disaster movie where it's kind of normal and they're like, "It can never happen here." Everything was still open, and it was being used as an experiment. "Let's see what happens if everything stays open." So we were in that little fantasy for about a month or so, and when I got back, that's when I started working on the record. But it was just hell. It was luxurious this time because I could go back to England or Scotland whenever I wanted. We could actually be together in the same room, listen to things, get excited, and hug it out. That was the thing that really bothered me about the previous record: There was no visceral physical element at all. It was completely disconnected. This time, it was any excuse toto be in the studio and blast the tracks out loud.