Automatic : Is It Now?
Automatic wants it both ways: Keep existing as the supreme dancepunk trio who consistently for nine plus years have pushed out avant pop jammers powered by synths, drums, and bass-cold grooves, that consistently speak truth to power. But the trio realizes you also gotta give people the outlet to dance. The senses awaken the slumber. “The world’s already depressing as it is,” says Izzy Glaudini in the press notes for the new and dastardly plucky Is It Now? “You’ve got to find the joy, because you can’t let them take everything.”
With Signal, their 2019 debut album, Izzy Glaudini, Lola Dompé, and Halle Saxon deliberately removed the guitar from their band, creating a vast space filled with many versions of post-punk, dance-rock, and indie music—they crafted their own fonk (with an o), similar to how Devo and ESG groove. They are avant-garde, futuristic musicians, and unsuspecting fans are always being converted—I’ve seen it. Automatic in San Francisco covertly impressing stuffy hipsters (Yep, that’s SF for ya) and overaged, grizzled, skateboarder dudes in the Mission District, who happened to be waiting for headliner Osees, get lost and found in droning, thick layers of murmur. Fans waiting for Julian Casablancas’ new project, The Voidz, I’ve observed get turned on and burned—pleasurably—by Automatic’s crypt-keeper vibes, with dagger-like synths, drumstick hits, and monotone vocals. This trio, which named their band after a song by the Go-Gos—the first all-female band to write their own songs and play their instruments on a number one album in the U.S.—have been doing the work for a long-assed minute. I’m a witness.
So what’s up with Is It Now? Maturity, and letting off a bit. The doom-gloom groove is still alive and quirking, moving that coiffed asymmetrical haircut on the blue-lit back room dancefloor, for sure. But now we have flutes accenting the deviant pop, on the hard-driving “mq9” and ode to the sound of drone bombs, that sees the trio take minimalism and Moog sci-fi business into bombs-over-Baghdad EFX territory for sure.
There is political commentary here, but who has time for that on the first or the fourth listen when Halle Saxon is doing more with less, dealing out a bassline that is absolutely clever architecture alongside Lola Dompé’s breakdown going into a battle drum break while Izzy Glaudini’s synths make more moves than Schwarzenegger in a classic Carolco flick. Next up is “Mercury” with drum machine meter, bounce-house bass lines, and ginned up synths that finally calm down toward the end when the breakbeat slumbers into half-time devolution.
Maybe it’s the “we’re all doomed, so let’s not talk about it as much” mindstate here, or the production work by Loren Humphrey, known for Arctic Monkeys and others, that’s making the third album seem lean, made by folks, excuse me, musicians who’ve seen some stuff. Whatever the kismet, Automatic has punched up the soundtrack for the apocalypse, once again. and it’s indestructible.
Label: Stones Throw
Year: 2025
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Automatic : Is It Now?
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