Since its founding in Manchester in 2008 as a solo recording project by its creative mastermind and primary songwriter Craig Dyer, the prolific Berlin-based post punk act The Underground Youth has developed a cult-like following through the release of nine albums which have established a primal and intense sound.
Earlier this year, the band which also features Leo Kaage (guitar, production), Dyer’s wife Olga (drums) and Max James (bass) were in the middle of their first North American tour when the pandemic forced the band to cut their tour short and return home. Additionally, their original plans to head to the studio upon the completion of the tour also ground down to a halt with the members of the band spending several months in isolation as a result of pandemic-related restrictions and lockdowns.
The Berlin-based act;’s forthcoming tenth album The Falling was written and recorded in Craig Dyer’s and Leo Kaage’s apartments-turned studios. The album is a marked departure from their previous work with the material showcasing a softer, more cinematic sound, centered around acoustic guitar and piano, as well as string and violin arrangements. Unsurprisingly, the album sonically and thematically is a product of the distressing, uncertain and very unfamiliar world we find ourselves living in right now, while expressing the frustrations, heartbreak and longing for a past we may never get back.
“Lyrically this album finds me at my most honest and autobiographical,” The Underground Youth’s Craig Dyer says in press notes. “I still shroud the reality of what I have written within something of a fictional setting, but the honesty and the romance that shines throughout the record is more sincere than it has been in my previous work. The idea was to strip back the band to allow for lyrical breathing space.”
The album’s first single is the introspective “A Sorrowful Race,.” Centered around an arrangement of strummed acoustic guitar, twinkling bursts of keys, a supple bass line, and brooding string arrangement paired with Dyer’s plaintive baritone, “A Sorrowful Race” is a cinematic yet unvarnished and painfully honest bit of self-examination of its narrator’s sense of ego, self-worth and feelings of envy. If you’ve ever felt resentment and hatred because someone else has attained the success you haven’t, the song should feel both familiar — and like a call out of your own ugliness and frailties.
“This track is something of personal attack on myself, and the narcissistic frustration at those whose success has overshadowed my own,” Craig Dyer explains in press notes. ” It could be perceived as egoistic, but the idea with this record was to be as honest as possible lyrically, that included addressing the feelings that were maybe harder to face.”
The recently released video by the band’s Olga Dyer employs a simple, DIY-like concept: Olga Dyer recording her husband singing the song in their living room full of books and records,.
The Falling is slated for a March 12, 2021 release through Fuzz Club Records,.