Seasons change, the years go by, and – unexpectedly – LCD Soundsystem seem to grow in potency. Maybe the meta nature of their work protects them from the aging process, but the group’s material feels more vital, more current with each passing week. Catching the group in action at Glastonbury this summer was an exquisite pleasure, the stunning interplay onstage allowing the material – by now thoroughly worn in – to take on new layers of meaning. Songs about aging resounding in the lives of those who had grown up with them – LCD Soundsystem had now become meta versions of themselves, the serpent chewing down on its own tail.
With Primavera Sound recently letting the cat out of the bag, LCD Soundsystem are currently working on a new album – their fifth to date, and the band’s first since 2017’s broadly-speaking-pretty-great ‘American Dream’.
If LCD’s arc towards subtle songwriting peaked on 2010’s excellent ‘This Is Happening’, then new single ‘x-ray eyes’ rolls all of that back. An act of subversive devolution, it moves to the lyrical minimalism of those early 12 inches, James Murphy’s semi-spoken hipster nonchalance moving passively out of the speakers.
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In a way, it’s teasing out different flavours from a recipe they know well. The mix, the interplay between those bubbling synths and the grinding drums, is finessed to the finest point, the laser-sharp way LCD conduct themselves in the studio apparent from first note to last. James Murphy’s vocal – “I’ve got eyes that can see inside / I can see right through your disguise” – seems to reinforce that elder-statesman vibe, the (perhaps deserved) sneer of someone who has been there, and done it.
Crafted alongside Al Doyle and Nancy Whang, ‘x-ray eyes’ pivots into core attributes of LCD Soundsystem as a project, without truly adding anything new. But then, when was adding something new the raise d’etre of this slippery, post-modernist band? Holding true to both their sound and their standards, ‘x-ray eyes’ bodes well for LCD5.
8/10
Words: Robin Murray
