British electronic pioneers Underworld (Rick Smith, Karl Hyde) announce a triumphant return to North America – their first series of shows here since selling out the Hollywood Bowl 5 years ago. This tour coincides with the 40th anniversary of Smith and Hyde meeting and setting out on one of the longest lasting creative partnerships in electronic music.
Underworld will perform their immersive and gloriously hallucinatory 2-hour plus live sets at showcases in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Toronto plus a highly anticipated debut performance at Movement in Detroit. The setlist will include classic cuts from their storied discography as well as more recent material from their year-in-the-making epic DRIFT: Series 1 premiering on US stages for the first time.
Underworld’s journey began 40 years ago when Smith and Hyde met in the spring of 1980 while at university in Cardiff. Since then, the duo have maintained a long, complicated and prolific friendship and created a peerless body of work that includes their 1994 breakthrough dubnobasswithmyheadman through 1996’s Second Toughest In The Infants, and 1999’s sublime Beaucoup Fish, to 2007’s masterful Oblivion with Bells, 2016’s Grammy-nominated Barbara Barbara, we face a shining future, and most recently, 2019’s groundbreaking DRIFT series which saw the band record and release music weekly for an entire year before releasing the results as a majestic seven-disc box set. Outside of record releases, their work includes everything from the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics to a hugely acclaimed collaboration with punk legend Iggy Pop and cinematic genius Danny Boyle. As architects of the intersection between art, rock, and electronic music, they have influenced everyone from Radiohead to Foals to Daniel Avery.
Relentless innovators, Underworld’s output reaches across all media. Their creative legacy is one that includes everything from poems, books, music and a digital diary of words and found art that has run daily for the last two decades. Their partnership with design collective Tomato (responsible for creating packaging, short films, and visuals for the band, on and off tour) has helped reenforce the band’s utterly unique aesthetic.
Smith and Hyde’s unrivalled live show has been headlining festivals and arenas across the world for years. This North American tour promises to deliver a brilliant and uncompromising synthesis of ideas and sounds that have been the best part of a lifetime in the making.
Underworld North American Tour Dates
Friday, May 15 – San Francisco, The Warfield
Saturday, May 16 – Los Angeles, The Shrine
Wednesday, May 20 – New York, Hammerstein Ballroom
Saturday, May 23 – Detroit, Movement Festival
Wednesday, May 27 – Toronto, CA, Rebel
