
Release Date | 25/10/2024 |
Format | 2LP Black |
Label | Smith Hyde Productions |
Catalogue Number | UWR00098LP |
Underworld announce their eleventh album, ‘Strawberry Hotel’, released via Virgin Music Group.
Here, gleaming tensile techno forms clean, straight lines while scratchy acoustic guitars scuff up edges to produce ghostly audio. Poetry is snatched from the overhead, removed from the overheard; words borrowed from the ether are spun into dizzying new shapes, sometimes reappearing in new settings, twisted back to front, side to
side. Each track a very different room - some soundtracked by little more than metronomic kick drum and robotic voice, others deep in layer upon layer of melody and euphoric noise - and each room unmistakably, uniquely Underworld. The only advice from Underworld’s Rick Smith and Karl Hyde upon entering: “Please don’t shuffle.”
‘Strawberry Hotel’ features the singles ‘and the colour red’ and ‘denver luna’, as well as ‘Black Poppies’, a celestial love song, a hymn to the universe and to boundless, positive change. Ambient and beatless, ‘Black Poppies’ is a celebration of full dancefloors and the beauty of life itself.
‘Strawberry Hotel’, their first since 2019’s epic, experimental ‘Drift’ project, where the band recorded, mixed and released new music every week for a year.
Underworld are Rick Smith and Karl Hyde. Their peerless first album - ‘dubnobasswithmyheadman’ - was released to universal acclaim in 1994. In the thirty years since that mould-breaking debut, the band have established their reputation as one of the most groundbreaking and important electronic acts of all time, one that constantly pushes creative boundaries, twists genres and refuses to stay still. In those thirty years, their music has soundtracked approximately 100,000,000 nights out, and
the mornings after. In the past year alone, Underworld have played live in front of over half a million people all across the globe.
Tracklist
Black Poppies
denver luna
Techno Shinkansen
and the colour red
Sweet Lands Experience
Lewis In Pomona
Hilo Sky
Burst Of Laughter
King Of Haarlem
Ottavia
denver luna (acapella)
Gene Pool
Oh Thorn!
Iron Bones
Stick Man Test