The Underground Youth - Sadovaya

As the record approaches its ten-year anniversary are repressing The Underground Youth’s 2010 LP ‘Sadovaya’. A masterclass in the lo-fi psychedelic post-punk that the band cultivated in their earlier works, the album will get its second pressing after Fuzz Club issued it to vinyl for the first time back in 2014 (now, of
course, long sold-out.) Looking back on the album, Craig Dyer recalls: “If memory serves, though it doesn't always, the songs on "Sadovaya" were written between my hometown of Blackpool and St. Petersburg, Russia, which I visited a number of times during this period. The album title was taken from the historically significant street, Sadovaya Ulitsa, close to which Olya and I stayed on one of my visits. We also stayed a number of times at the Art House Hotel, from where the title of the albums opening track 'Art House Revisited' came from.”

Given its origins, both geographically and personally, it’s unsupring, then, that the album is a collection of love songs steeped in Russian imagery; influenced just as much by the writings of Dostoyevsky, Lermontov and Pushkin, as it is Soviet-era cinema and music (Craig cites gothic post-punk band Kino as one particularly strong
influence.) ‘Sadovaya’ was a self-recorded and originally self-released piece of work. The limitations inherent in that borne out in the record’s stark, lo-fi feel–and being all the better for it: “The album was all recorded in the same basic bedroom home-recording style and on the same substandard and unreliable equipment as the three
albums that came before, the previous being "Mademoiselle” He continues: “There’s a genuine naivety to the recordings that makes it my most visceral, personal record.”

Repress on white vinyl limited to 500 copies.