Strawberry Hotel

Welcome to Strawberry Hotel. 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 new release 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.

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 across the globe.