For an artist who has always played with reinvention; as glam-rock mystic, electronic siren, ambient poet, and synth-pop high priestess, Alison Goldfrapp has rarely sounded as personally rooted and emotionally open as she does on Flux. Arriving quickly after her 2023’s club-ready The Love Invention, Flux doesn’t abandon the dancefloor at all but it does reorient things inward. On this album ecstasy isn’t just counted in BPMs, but in surrendering to vulnerability, transition, and light.
Flux is the first release on Goldfrapp’s own AG Records, and it shows: this feels like an album of confident ownership, of sound, story, and self. That independence manifests in the thematic currents that run throughout the record. The title itself alludes to impermanence, and the songs inside form a constellation of emotional in-betweenness. There are moments of becoming, songs cresting, unraveling, and reforming. Soul-searching and shimmer move hand in hand, exploring vulnerability without sacrificing Goldfrapp’s signature flair for the fantastical.
That duality, heady interiority cloaked in gleaming pop design, crystallizes from the first seconds of album opener “Hey Hi Hello,” a track that could easily have felt like a cousin to Supernature-era Goldfrapp with its lush, continental synth lines. But here, nostalgia is spiked with a tinge of heartbreak and the track blooms into a bittersweet farewell wrapped in euphoric melody. It’s a tone-setter, equal parts lament and liberation.
Lead single “Find Xanadu” is the album’s beating heart though. The joy-saturated blast of technicolor synth-pop it provides is almost sacred rather than shallow. As Flux was produced with long-time collaborator Richard X and Swedish synth artisan Stefan Storm (Sound of Arrows), tracks like this are high-gloss fantasia in the lineage of Goldfrapp’s own “Ooh La La” and “Rocket.” But where those songs pulsed with theatrical swagger, “Find Xanadu” is more earnest in its pursuit of wonder, it isn’t just a place, it’s also a state of being, a romantic ideal and grasp of emotional clarity that Goldfrapp’s always chasing here but never cages.
The album’s central arc might be one of transformation, but it never strays too far from pop. That’s its greatest strength: it merges Goldfrapp’s introspective evolution with some of the stickiest, strongest hooks of her career. “Reverberotic” is a triumphant song that shape-shifts from ambient elegance to electro-groove and back again. It echoes musical ghosts from her past but with even more maturity and artistic confidence that makes it feel like a spiritual sequel rather than a retread. There are lighter, warmer touches too. “Cinnamon Light,” with its breezy ‘80s synth tones, is all wistful affection, like a late-summer postcard tinged with existential doubt. Questioning her place, our place, in life and it hits harder the more the track glints and glistens around it. Even when Goldfrapp dives back into dance-pop territory, as on the housey “Play It (Shine Like a Nova Star),” the effect is euphoric, but also strangely intimate, raw, and bursting with unvarnished humanity beneath its mirrorball sparkle.
Much of the album’s tactile emotion is likely owed to its author’s personally reflective period and it draws on an inner stillness to balance its synthetic architecture. Goldfrapp has said she felt “in flux” herself while making the record; this has clearly found its way into the songs’ gentle tension between resolution and uncertainty. These are not anthems formed out of an arrival, they don’t boldly announce, they seem molded through grief or through joy. There’s a definite transformation and yet, for all the talk of change, it feels like a logical, deeply satisfying, continuation of Goldfrapp’s artistic legacy. Whether conjuring aurora borealis through music, “Sound & Light,” or crafting pop bangers from vulnerability, she proves that reinvention, when it’s honest, doesn’t need spectacle to dazzle. Think of Flux as an elegant evolution. She’s still dancing, but this time with her heart closer to the surface.
8/10
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Review first published: The Line Of Best Fit – August 14th, 2025