plopping things in where you wanted them and moving things around to see how it sounded. We loved it!" The extra track "Bonus Beats" from the album's 2019 expanded edition also sees the band's drummer Andy Ramsay experimenting with a drum machine. The album's title references Norman McLaren's 1940 animated short films Dots and Loops. Musical style According to AllMusic critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Dots and Loops is primarily influenced by bossa nova and 1960s pop music. Barney Hoskyns of Rolling Stone found that the album continued Stereolab's progression towards a lighter sound that he termed "avant-easy listening", while Michelle Goldberg of Metro referred to it as the band's "lounge apotheosis". Treble writer Jeff Terich noted the "more lush" quality of the music on Dots and Loops compared to Stereolab's previous work, characterising it as "gorgeously orchestrated" art pop. Erlewine observed that Stereolab "concentrated on layered compositions" on Dots and Loops. He described the band's interplay on the album as edging "closer to jazz than rock, exploring all of the possibilities of any melodic phrase." Alex Hudson of Exclaim! wrote that "if there's any krautrock to be found here, it's not the motorik pulse of Neu! but the freaky, funky jazz exploration of Can." Pitchforks Eric Harvey said that Dots and Loops exemplified the "recombinant pop" aesthetic that arose in the 1990s, which saw rock musicians embracing the "looped, sampled and collaged" production techniques of electronic and hip hop music. The album frequently makes use of time signatures, including on the tracks "Diagonals", "Rainbo Conversation", and "Parsec". Themes According to Sophie Kemp of Vice, Dots and Loops is informed by Stereolab's "ideology" of "tackling both despotism and exploring the artistic boundaries of living by capitalism", with the album seeing the band's chief lyricist Lætitia Sadier commenting on "different fears about the world in every track". Kemp found that these themes are complemented by the album's "sprightly spirit", interpreting the "serene" quality of the music as "a very topical critique on the numbness of society and how the more comfortable we get with capitalism, the more jaded we become to pain and suffering." Eric Harvey suggested that the song "Brakhage" concerns both "consumerist desire" and "the sheer amount of studio gadgets required to make the album itself." Stewart Mason of AllMusic said that the lyrics of "Miss Modular" "sound influenced by the Situationist theory of the 'spectacle'". "The Flower Called Nowhere"