Live at The Powerstation
25 June 2026
Live Review by Music Journalist: Paul Marshall
Myself and a fellow music lover, and partner in crime for the evening, entered The Powerstation in Auckland having spent some time across the road at Galbraith’s Alehouse, quietly prepping ourselves for what was about to unfold. There’s always that ritual before a good gig: a couple of pints, a few predictions, the usual talk of “will they sound like the record” and “will they actually play that song tonight.”
To our surprise, as we crossed back over the road toward the venue, it wasn’t raining, so that already felt like a good omen.
Inside, The Powerstation carried that familiar pre-show hum, part anticipation, part collective memory of every great gig that’s ever lived in those walls.
Opening the evening were Glass Vaults, slipping on stage with the understated confidence of a band that knows exactly what decade it’s borrowing from, and exactly how to bend it out of shape.
They came in sounding like an alternate 1983, all analogue shimmer and post-punk angularity, somewhere between Talking Heads if they’d grown up on Wellington wind and rain instead of New York paranoia. Frontman Richard Larsen delivered his lines in that cool, almost detached monotone: lyrics about control, agency, and the illusion of both, hanging in the air like half-finished thoughts you’re not supposed to fully decode.
In front of him, the crowd was already moving. Not in any dramatic way, just that slow collective nod that says: yes, this is landing.
And then there was the quiet weapon in the lineup: Bevan Smith on bass, playing with a kind of deceptive restraint. The groove was tight, but never predictable, little melodic detours tucked inside the rhythm, like he was redrawing the song in real time while everyone else thought it was already finished.
Larsen, clearly enjoying himself more than his vocal delivery ever suggested, at one point made a cheeky move, standing side on to the audience and shaking his booty at the crowd, which drew a few smiles from the ladies in the front row. He spent the rest of the set gently sashaying in place, as if the stage itself had become a metronome he was loosely negotiating with.
By the end, there was a sense they’d done exactly what an opener should: warm the room without trying to own it. You could easily imagine catching them again in a different city, a slightly bigger stage, and the same sly grin still intact.
Then came the shift in atmosphere. The room dimmed into expectation, and Stereolab arrived like a transmission from another frequency entirely, less “support act to headliner transition,” more “dimension change.”
They opened with a synth line that felt like it couldn’t decide whether it wanted to start or dissolve. It stuttered, restarted, hovered, a deliberate hesitation that immediately signalled we were in their world now.
Early on, the sound mix struggled to find its footing in the room. The engineer wrestled the board like it was a live organism, feedback squeals, sharp digital squarks, little sonic cracks appearing at the edges of the first few tracks. But strangely, it didn’t break the spell. If anything, it added to it. The audience, already steeped in affection for the band’s catalogue, simply filled the gaps with memory.
Front woman Lætitia Sadier is not a performer who over-explains. Between songs there were long silences, sometimes a clipped “thank you,” sometimes a softly accented “merci,” and then nothing at all, the band occasionally glancing at each other like they were waiting for instructions only they could hear.
And yet when the music locked in, it locked in hard.
“The Flower Called Nowhere” floated through the room with deceptively simple phrasing, “All the small boats on the water, aren't going anywhere” drifting out like a nursery rhyme translated through a dream. The lyrics might read as childlike on paper, but Sadier’s delivery, shaped by English as a second language, gives them a different texture entirely: less literal meaning, more emotional abstraction. The result is hypnotic rather than immediate, a slow gravitational pull rather than a hook.
Sadier’s guitar choice adds to that sense of controlled oddity. She plays a right-handed Fender Mustang left-handed, unmodified, strings untouched, orientation inverted. It shouldn’t work in conventional terms, but it does something more interesting: it creates a playing style that feels slightly offset from expectation, like she’s always arriving at the chord from a different direction.
As the set progressed, the floor crowd settled into a collective sway, almost aquatic, like “hypnotised fish in a barrel,” moving with the currents rather than against them.
There were moments where songs refused to end cleanly, stretching into looping structures that the audience seemed happy to inhabit. “Miss Modular” landed as a standout, funk-adjacent, slightly reggae-tinted rhythm, filtered through that unmistakable French/UK avant-pop lens. It was loose, but never careless.
And this is the paradox of Stereolab: they are structurally intricate but emotionally unforced. Live, that tension becomes more visible and more compelling. They don’t chase immediacy. They build environments.
On “Esemplastic Creeping Eruption,” the set hit another gear entirely. The dynamic range widened, the light and shade more pronounced, and drummer Andy Ramsay emerged as a quiet focal point, precise, almost jazz-controlled aggression, all measured impact and deliberate restraint. There was a discipline to it that anchored the band’s more exploratory edges.
Elsewhere, echoes of Cocteau Twins and Kraftwerk surfaced briefly, not as imitation, but as distant genetic markers in a much more hybrid sonic organism. Stereolab’s sound has always been collage rather than lineage, and live it becomes even more elastic. Songs veered left when you expected straight, doubled back when you thought they were resolving, and occasionally just… kept going.
The encore peak arrived with “Cybele’s Reverie,” where things briefly unraveled in a human way. Sadier’s tambourine lost a couple of jingles mid-performance; she calmly plucked the loose pieces out and discarded them without breaking the spell. No drama, just continuation.
By the end of the night, something unusual had become noticeable: very few phones in the air. Whether by accident or collective agreement, the audience had chosen presence over documentation, a rare thing in 2026.
And that may be the most telling detail of all.
Because Stereolab don’t really ask for attention. They ask for immersion.
Set List:
- 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
- Esemplastic Creeping Eruption
- Simple Headphone Mind
- Percolator
- Electrified Teenybop!
Encore:
- Immortal Hands
- Cybele's Reverie
Reviewer: Paul Marshall
Photography by Paul Marshall
WATCH THE LIVE VIDEO at Paul Was There -