Los Angeles, CA · post-punk · synth

Automatic

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Minimalist LA synth-punk trio — icy grooves and motorik precision, like a security-camera feed of a party you're not cool enough to attend.

Automatic formed in Los Angeles in 2017, when Izzy Glaudini, Halle Saxon and Lola Dompé met through the city's DIY scene and started playing shows together. They took their name from the Go-Go's track "Automatic," off the album Beauty and the Beat. Dompé later left the band, leaving Glaudini and Saxon as its core.

The trio built their sound with no guitar at all: synthesizer, bass and drums, drawing on late-1970s and early-1980s post-punk and coldwave. Basslines repeat, drum patterns stay dry, and vocals are traded between members in a flat, unemotive register, with the synth carrying most of the melody over deliberately spare arrangements.

Automatic signed to the Los Angeles label Stones Throw in June 2019 and released their debut album, Signal, that September, following singles including a cover of Delta 5's "Mind Your Own Business." A remix collection, Signal Remixes, followed in 2021 with reworkings by Peanut Butter Wolf, Sudan Archives, Peaking Lights, Osees' John Dwyer and Kevin Haskins.

A second album, Excess, came out on Stones Throw in June 2022, preceded by the singles "New Beginning" and "Venus Hour." A third album, Is It Now?, followed in September 2025, led by its title single released that June.

Dompé, the band's original drummer, is the daughter of Bauhaus drummer Kevin Haskins and joined her first band, the art-rock outfit Blackblack, at thirteen. His remix work on Signal Remixes came years after she had already left home to make music of her own.

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