Review: Stereolab Infuse Miami Beach With Cool

I'm willing to listen to arguments that Stereolab's Tuesday night concert at the Miami Beach Bandshell wasn't the best local concert of 2025.

I'd disagree, but I'd listen.

However, I will not stand for any rebuttal when I tell you their long-awaited concert was the best South Florida show of the year, and it involved a trombone.
Stereolab, the avant-pop European group with lyrics sung alternatingly in French and English, last played Miami in a supporting role at Lollapalooza all the way back in 1994. Thirty-one years later, they played a ninety-minute set that was well worth the many decades' wait for a well-behaved and eager crowd. By the time the five members of Stereolab took the stage at 8:30 p.m., a notoriously late-arriving city had already packed the venue and bought out most of the band's t-shirts at the merch table.
To the beep boop robotic chimes of "Mystical Plosives" that kick off their newest album Instant Holograms on Metal Film, the quintet assembled behind their instruments and got to work. Under the Crayola-like lights of a technicolor New Wave film, they immersed the audience in a wall of sound. There's no other act in my mind that can go from sounding like old school mid-twentieth century children's music to a jazz ensemble to experimental indie rock to a psychedelic jam band all over the course of a single song as Stereolab did last night in a close to ten-minute tour-de-force performance of the song "Melodie Is a Wound".

Much of their fifteen-song set was comprised of tracks off their newest record. It was a treat to watch how they brought these exotic sounds to life, whether it was through synthesizer, guitar, or especially when frontwoman Lætitia Sadier blew on that previously mentioned most absurd of instruments, the trombone, and ran the horn through distortion in the midst of "Melodie Is a Wound". That rendition was so awe-inspiring that it was worth mentioning the song twice in this review. Stereolab managed to stretch and mold it in sonic shapes you never saw coming. It seemed the song was about to end several times, but it went in a different direction, keeping hips shaking and heads bobbing in the humid seaside air.
The between-song chit-chat from Saider was minimal, mostly consisting of "Merci" at the ends of songs that were met with riotous applause. It was hard to hear what else she muttered in her low voice between songs, but whenever she spoke, whatever it was she would say resulted in laughs and cheers. Some of those biggest cheers came when they played oldie but goodie "Cybele's Reverie" off their 1996 album Emperor Tomato Ketchup. After this, they abruptly left the stage at 9:45 p.m., only to quickly return after chants of "encore".

For once, Sadier spoke clearly, loudly, and wittily: "We can only play 15 more minutes before this will turn into a pumpkin." They treated the crowd to two more songs before the show had to end at the legally mandated 10:00 closing time. The houselights came on, and the band came out to mingle, sign records and T-shirts, and pose for selfies. They teased us, "Let's do this again."

Here's hoping Miami won't have to wait another 31 years for that next Stereolab gig to happen.      

Setlist:

Aerial Troubles
Motoroller Scalatron
Vermona F Transistor
Peng! 33
The Flower Called Nowhere
Melodie Is a Wound
If You Remember I Forgot How to Dream Pt. 1
If You Remember I Forgot How to Dream Pt. 2
Miss Modular
Household Names
Electrified Teenybop!
Esemplastic Creeping Eruption
Cybele's Reverie
Percolator
Immortal Hands