Automatic – Is it Now?: Album Review

By JohnMartinson on 23rd September 2025 • ( Leave a comment )

Izzy Glaudini, Halle Saxon, and Lola Dompé; Automatic; clearly don’t like sitting around. Is it Now? is their third album in five years. Add into this extensive tours of their own and in support of other acts, as well as personal projects away from music, it’s clear they want to keep their pace and momentum going for sometime yet.

Release Date: September 26th 2025

Label: Stones Throw

Format: CD / Vinyl / Digital

MAKE SPACE FOR WINDPIPES

Automatic are a band unafraid to rip up the rulebooks they’ve previously ignored. Their latest album opens with an extraordinary swagger. Black Box offers a seemingly effortless mix of Bossa Nova drum fills with a killer bass line. It mixes with jazz bar vocals and a synth reverb that sounds as fresh today as it would have in the ’80s.. The trio almost compete for space, and yet each find their own corner. Halle Saxon’s bass makes the early breaks in the opening tracks of the album; there a playful maturity to the way the bass holds up the melodies across several of the tracks.

For all the sameness in the industry, there are those unafraid, and probably unaffected, by the mainstream. Automatic do not hang about in setting an almost sneering tone in the opening lyrics (‘Run baby run, oh the damage has been done’). The aforementioned bassline jaunts and drum fills emerge as a continuing theme on the album. On mq9 we get wind pipes and sirens – oh the fun they must have on the mixing desk! Further experimentation and exemplary drum fills surface later in the album. Closing track, Terminal, is an unsettling track that drives through to the very final beat.

IF SYNTH-PUNK LIVES, IT LIVES HERE

Lazy, a lead song, is a smartly crafted synth-pop prance. Automatic’s vocals crack through the solid layers and textures of the rhythm and lead instruments bank of sound. The album’s title track, Is It Now?, showcases the playful rehearsal room romps through extensive hooks, riffs and some no-holds-barred punk vocals. The song opens with possibly my favourite lyrics on the entire album (‘Cut your hair with kitchen scissors…’) and this playful word play continues through this gem of a track. Of a similar vein is another standout track on the album, Don’t Wanna Dance. There’s a hint of Blondie, if the darker edges of Debbie Harry got more space. It’s lamenting and full of truly languid vocals. Irony is not lost on a track that is not, by design, a dance floor filler.

URBANITES REJOICE

There’s an increased sense here that the trio were looking to make an album of their taking and ignoring any current music sentiment. Playboi is a brilliant social observation on some of the seedier sides of any city streets and Smog Summer is as hazy as the title suggests. Lyrically, it matches sumptuously with the pulsating layers that balance perfectly. As one of the deeper cuts on the album, it serves to add to the Orwellian nuances that influence the album – it’s industrial electro sound juxtaposes resoundingly with the lyrical declaration “Burn it all; Burn it all”.

The Prize builds slowly from one of the more downbeat intros on the album. It is a song soaking in the cool of the type of backing track you might hear in a dimly-lit record store; if you know Vinyl Exchange in Manchester, then you’ll understand where this sits. It’s a dystopian saunter yet still with a favourable helping of synth slides and snare fills: “Follow it down to the grave of an oil field”. Country Song is an unashamedly post-punk synth-rich lamentation about escaping the city and is a clear ode to how the band have treated their personal lives after extensive tours with IDLES, Tame Impala and The Marias.

THERE IS NO TEMPLATE

Automatic pick up where others hold back. There is no template – no copy and paste function for artists like this. Is It Now? thumps through an innumerable variety of instruments, samples and loops. At times, the lyrics and overall sense of the songs get lost, but there is a feel here that they already know that and, well, don’t seem perturbed by it. If you can’t beat them, then play a different game – and Automatic are ready to stand on their own field and do whatever rises to the fore. If you’re looking for a fresh take on 808 State, New Order and, to an extent, Kraftwerk – then this is recommended. There’s an unconventionally effortless cool about this type of sound and Automatic have stepped into their own with this.