The Underground Youth's tenth full-length is due out March 12th, stream the video for the first single below

We're thrilled to announce that on March 12th The Underground Youth will release their tenth album, ‘The Falling’, via Fuzz Club on March 12th. Announcing the record today, the band are now sharing the first single, titled ‘A Sorrowful Race’. The new full-length sees Craig and band trade their acerbic post-punk melancholy for a more refined and stripped-back sound that, instead, enters the world of romantic, shadowy folk-noir. You can stream the video for ‘A Sorrowful Race’ below and pre-order the album on vinyl, CD and tape here.

A marked departure from the primal intensity often heard on the band’s previous work, ‘The Falling’ – as this first single foreshadows – showcases a softer, more cinematic musical landscape, one shaped by acoustic guitars, piano, accordion and a heavy presence of violin and string arrangements. “Lyrically this album finds me at my most honest and autobiographical. 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”, Craig reflects on the album. 

‘A Sorrowful Race’, the first taste of the new record, is an inward-facing dissection of ego and narcissism.  ‘Why he’s achieved so much more than I, in such a short amount of time, well I’ll never understand why, I’ll just keep writing line after line after line after line’, Craig sings on the song. “This track is something of personal attack on myself, and the narcissistic frustration at those whose success has overshadowed my own. 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.”

As a result of the pandemic, ‘The Falling’ was recorded between Craig and guitarist/producer Leo Kaage’s apartments-turned-home-studios: “The album sees me going back to my writing approach from our earliest records, writing the demos as stripped back acoustic tracks at home. What started out as a set of romantic and deeply personal songs also took on the surrounding frustrations and feelings towards the situation we found ourselves in. Born from the heartbreak of how the worldwide pandemic has changed the industry we were thriving within, this album also functions as a love letter to the past.”