In 2018, Underworld undertook a mission that would test the limits of their creativity and unleash new palettes of colour in the process. Drift, a year-long music and video experiment where they promised to bring out a new release every Thursday, proved the durability of a band already recognised as pioneering electronic legends. When the project was wrapped up at the end of October 2019, it had clearly been a success, sucking in artists like Ø and The Necks for memorable collaborations, and the DRIFT Series 1 Sampler Edition compiled after the event is arguably one of Underworld’s finest and most unusual albums to date. That sense of achievement and optimism would’ve no doubt been stymied by the pandemic somewhat, and an alluded to second volume of Drift has yet to materialise, though Karl Hyde and Rick Smith could be forgiven for some reflection and recuperation before embarking onto the next thing.
Which brings us to Strawberry Hotel, which might have been regarded as epic at sixty-seven minutes had the unexpurgated DRIFT Series 1 not weighed in at just under seven hours. Nevertheless, there’s plenty of variegated life hanging around within these fifteen tracks, a surrealist patchwork with each song representing a different room in one big, brightly-coloured, psychedelic hotel. “The strawberry jam girl!” roars Hyde at the top of ‘Denver Luna’, sounding like an errant guest wandering the corridors. It’s a track which was released prior to the album in two formats, including an a capella version. Listeners will almost certainly notice a similar stream-of-consciousness style to ‘Born Slippy’, but significantly, it’s the proliferation of melody achieved with voice synthesis to create blocks of gorgeous harmonic colour that’s the most remarkable part.
Underworld, like Kraftwerk, have a not so secret past. Where the Germans unleashed a campaign of selective repackaging and denialism about the dominance of the flute in the early years, Underworld’s mediocre shot at pop stardom is there for all to see and hear on streaming, even if most tend to give it a swerve. Underworld’s modus operandi ever since could be interpreted as a kind of reactive ongoing deconstructionism, though Strawberry Hill – perhaps more than any album before it – embraces melody and channels it in a more mature and idiosyncratic way. They’ve not exactly gone back to their roots, but they can at least turn and face themselves in a way that would have been unthinkable in the mid-1990s.
If 2016’s Barbara Barbara, We Face a Shining Future was a shift towards a warmer sound, then in 2024 we can count ourselves lucky to be enjoying a vintage and masterful Underworld. Here they present us with the full gamut, from the cinematic to the euphoric, with the situations going from the eccentric and daft to the enjoyably baffling. ‘Ottavia’ features Rick Smith’s mezzo-soprano daughter Esme Bronwen-Smith reciting an English translation of L’incoronazione di Poppea by Monteverdi, imbuing it with a tragi-comic bathos, and ‘Sweet Lands Experience’ sees Hyde take on the mantle of the tenacious pub bore (“I was more smashed than you were”) over a wonderfully ambient soundscape where techno and prog coalesce. Elsewhere, ‘Lewis in Pomona’ and ‘King of Haarlem’ introduce us to two of the distinguished guests at the Strawberry Hotel, while Nina Nastasia pops up on ‘Iron Bones’ just as the album begins to wind down for a reflective and ambivalent conclusion. Their eleventh album proves there’s plenty of life in the old dog boys yet.
