After 2019’s 52-week audiovisual creative marathon, Drift, recent tunes with Irish producer Kettama and a busy touring schedule, the implacable Underworld return with a more conventional album – their 11th. Of course, Strawberry Hotel defies easy definition, veering from Born Slippy-indebted bangers to a simple closing guitar track via Ottavia – opera singer (and daughter of Rick Smith) Esme Bronwen-Smith’s delivery of a lament by Nero’s wife, set to a percolating electronic indictment.
The raver’s delights are clustered towards the front. Tracks such as Techno Shinkansen (gleaming disco house, Giorgio Moroder bassline) and Sweet Lands Experience (“I was more smashed than you were,” notes Karl Hyde over more primo Smith audio tweakery) confirm the dancefloor remains in Underworld’s forebrain, 30 years since their breakthrough with genre-straddling third album Dubnobasswithmyheadman (1994).
The abstractions towards the end of Strawberry Hotel are every bit as inviting. The excellent, three-legged Doppler synths on Burst of Laughter find Hyde singing warmly to the lonely and broken, echoing the gentle succour of this album’s defining psych-pastoral opener, Black Poppies – a powerful hymn to embracing change. Hyde is on his best cut-up lyrical form on Denver Luna and the blithe King of Haarlem, the latter often amounting to Jabberwocky rhyming slang that somehow contrives to make perfect sense.
