Stereolab’s first release on London label Too Pure, where they rubbed shoulders with PJ Harvey, Th’ Faith Healers and Pram, is the consummate example of the group’s early form. On ‘Super-Electric’ the pieces fall into place so effortlessly: Joe Dilworth’s drums ride out the Klaus Dinger pulse while Gane’s guitars chime incessantly, and bubbling electronics disrupt the song’s coast.

Bachelor Pad Music is surprising for the light it lets into the group’s world, with songs like ‘Avant-Garde M.O.R.’ and ‘The Groop Play Chord X’ feeling like a deep exhale after the wound tension of Peng! and Low-Fi. The album marks the beginning of Stereolab’s ongoing fascination with ersatz lounge music (a genre that smuggled the strange into the everyday with surprising consistency) but also proves that Gane could write genuinely graceful and moving melodies, and ‘Ronco Symphony’ still rings true as one of Stereolab’s most unaffected, lovely songs.

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Gane and Sadier also started their own record label, Duophonic, with their manager Martin Pike. While the label ended up releasing other groups (Tortoise, Labradford, Broadcast, Pram, The High Llamas, Huggy Bear, and the pre-Daft Punk Darlin’ all appeared on the label at some point), it is best known for releasing almost all the Stereolab albums and singles (on the UHF Disks imprint) while pumping out limited 7” and 10” singles (on the Super 45s imprint).

From there, Gane undertook a process he likened to excavation: “I cut a very, very tiny loop/sample, and I just glue them together so there’s maybe eight of them in a row, and that’s maybe lasting about a second, or a second and a half. The kind of blurred sound gives it something you can’t really precisely put your finger on, it’s a strange kind of loop. And then I pitch-shift them up and down to make a chord. And then all we do with the band, is we just listen really closely to what we can hear, Across the ‘90s and ‘00s, there were few groups as exploratory, as productive, and as exciting to follow as Stereolab. Sadier’s personal politics have always been deeply human, despite the desire for many to frame them as Marxism by numbers, and here she also shows great capacity for channelling the direct, emotional speech of the heart into song: ‘Feel and Triple’ traces the steps of Sadier and Hansen’s friendship with devastating honesty (“It took years to intimate / But finally love found a way / Unimpeded it could exist / So fun, so free”) while singing out a gorgeous remembrance of a singular individual.For many, Emperor Tomato Ketchup is the emblematic, or quintessential Stereolab album. It landed at a time when their cultural currency was particularly strong, and it certainly had learned lessons from Mars Audiac Quintet’s occasional languors; everything on Emperor Tomato Ketchup is on-point and clearly articulated. The group’s remit is impressive here, from the bowdlerised funk of ‘Metronomic Underground’, through ‘Cybele’s Reverie’’s starlet pop, and on into a clutch of songs that have Stereolab at their most pop-avant (‘Percolations’, ‘Les Yper Sound’, ‘Tomorrow Is Already Here’). We’re Not Adult Oriented’ might offer the thread that connects Peng! to 1994’s Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements, but The Groop Played “Space Age Bachelor Pad Music” is significant for other reasons, not least the first appearance on a Stereolab record of Sean O’Hagan, ex-Microdisney member, current and future High Llama, and arranger supreme. For the group’s first collaboration with Nurse With Wound (more a warped remix than an actual collaboration, as they never shared studio space) you can hear Steven Stapleton, NWW’s éminence grise, tearing into Stereolab’s material with glee, mutating it into abstruse patterns and building lattices of illogical rhythms. There are points in ‘Animal Or Vegetable (A Wonderful Wooden Reason…)’ where Stapleton’s collage aesthetic goes into overdrive, but the body of the 14-minute piece is a tribal thud that’s pure ‘It’s A Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl’.