Phantom Power is the sixth album by Welsh indie rock band Super Furry Animals, released on 21 July 2003 by Epic Records in the United Kingdom.

[10] A brief two-week session with Gorwel Owen at Rockfield Studios saw some of the album's more "straight ahead" tracks recorded with live vocals before the band returned to AV Happenings and "messed around" with them.

[5][9] Rhys's initial batch of songs were augmented by, among others, the Huw Bunford penned "Sex, War & Robots", the first time the guitarist had had one of his songs included on a Super Furry Animals album and also the first time he had sung lead vocals for the group, "Slow Life", which grew out of an electronic piece of music keyboardist Cian Ciaran had been working on for several years and "The Piccolo Snare" which was partly written in the studio.

[2][9] After the more produced Rings Around the World, which relied heavily on computers and electronics, the group were keen to make Phantom Power "a little more human" with guitarist Huw Bunford stating: "with technology you can do anything these days, but sometimes less is more".

[1][10] Many songs on the album are acoustic based and bass player Guto Pryce has claimed that they sounded "pretty good right from the start" which also contributed to the decision to avoid "over-tweak[ing] them in the studio".

[5][12][13] "Slow Life", a track which singer Gruff Rhys has described as the "most sonically impressive" song on Phantom Power, features techno influences and is based on a piece of electronic music written by keyboardist Cian Ciaran several years earlier.

[4][5] These harmonies give the album a California / West Coast of America feel, with comparisons being drawn to the work of The Beach Boys, particularly on the song "Venus and Serena".

The song is told from the perspective of a "bird living almost in a parallel universe to humans, oblivious to the gravity of the games which are being played around us", something which Rhys admits to feeling himself much of the time.

"Bleed Forever" deals specifically with the nuclear fallout from the Chernobyl disaster which fell over North Wales, allegedly causing an increase in incidents of leukaemia among children in the area.

[17][18] "Valet Parking", for example, is a song about "the glories of pan-European travel", documenting a road trip from Cardiff to Vilnius, "Golden Retriever" is about "the relationship between [Gruff Rhys's] girlfriend's two dogs - a male and a female" and "The Undefeated", inspired by a poor run of results for the Welsh football team, is about "underdogs and overdogs".

[20] Keyboardist Cian Ciaran stated at the time of Phantom Power's release that the band would issue a DVD with every future album, claiming that "this is just the way we make records now".

However, the band's next two albums, Love Kraft and Hey Venus!, were not made available on DVD and, in a 2008 interview with Uncut, Rhys suggested that the release had been something of a failure: "no one gave a shit because people just want to rock n' roll!

According to drummer Dafydd Ieuan the band didn't have the money to pay the artists involved for their remix work so, in order to provide them with royalties, promised to release an album featuring the tracks on their own label, Placid Casual.

Phantom Power was released on 21 July 2003 in Japan with two additional tracks, "Summer Snow" and "Blue Fruit", added after "Slow Life" at the end of the album.

"[8] Several critics commented on the "summery pop" nature of the record with Tiny Mix Tapes likening the album to "the sun shining through following a large and brooding thunderstorm" and The Times calling it "mellow summer listening" despite the "grim view of the world" expressed in Gruff Rhys's lyrics.

[15] Irish website entertainment.ie saw Phantom Power as "a highly polished affair, filled with the widescreen classic pop that Gruff Rhys and co. carry off so effortlessly ... thankfully free of the techno experiments that marred so much of their previous work".

[12] Stylus Magazine expressed similar views, claiming that Phantom Power "feels very much like business as usual for the Welsh wizards, as if they've made just another album".