Immersion
What Is Lost Will Return
SWIM~
Sometimes a great album transcends analysis and becomes more of a feeling or a metaphor, or conjures up a scene. So for me, here is What Is Lost Will Return, the new album by Immersion: You’re on a road trip in rosy-fingered dawn; then blue morning; then white noon; then shadowed and squinting afternoon; then at violet dusk; then in photo-cell luminaire, neon-strobed, starless night. You are timeless and alone with the road and the sky, except for an ever-present tick-tock of an old watch. And you’re listening to the perfect motorway in the form of motorik pop, sweet as a Satie or France Gall, yet persuasive and persistent as the hum of the motor and the rhythm of the roadway dream.
Immersion is the extraordinary life/music collaboration between Colin Newman and Malka Spigel. Their new album is full of melody, persistence, gravity, and power. It’s the happily hypnotic NEU!-pop dream you needed in your life, even if you didn’t know it. By way of introduction, you may know Newman from the legendary Wire, who released some of the best shattering yet painterly art-punk of the late 1970s with an impressive return in the mid-1980s, and who re-emerged in this century with a string of superb yet undersung albums. For her part, Spigel sang and played bass in Israel’s Minimal Compact in the 1980s (and beyond), composing a wholly distinctive kind of Can-esque, Rough-Trade-via-Cleveland post-punk.
Spigel has worked with Newman (and others) on some extraordinary projects since then—notably the duo’s rewarding and fascinating Nanocluster collaboration series—but nothing as fully developed as Immersion. Their last album, 2025’s WTF??, was the first Immersion album where I felt that Newman and Spigel were truly free of Wire’s considerable shadow; it was the moment Immersion stopped being a side project and became the project. And perhaps because they’ve had roughly 30 years to hone this (that’s how long Spigel and Newman have been releasing EPs and albums under the Immersion name), they now seem to know exactly what Immersion is: the greatest yé-yé-accented motorik pop band known to man.
What Is Lost Will Return doesn’t so much go from strength to strength as start strong with a metronomic bass that sort of echoes Wire’s “I Am the Fly” and stays the course, sluicing through a gorgeous, chiming, patient, persistent take on maximum-minimalist lilt-pop. You know how Stereolab changed your life by mixing lullaby melodies with the caffeinated throb of “What Goes On”–isms? This record is a more spacious, measured, ever so slightly adult version of that, with an effective and well-distributed dusting of musique concrète touches.
The result is an optimistic kind of mega-melodic krautrock, emotional, powerful, and restrained in that dreamy punk sort of way. This is music that digs in without drooling—it’s Icelandic Route 66 music, perhaps—transfixing yet never soporific, edgy but never abrasive, and perfect for any old or new highway dream. What Is Lost Will Return is certainly a highlight of the duo’s respective discographies, as well as one of 2026.
