The Underground Youth Low Slow Needle [2021 Reissue]

To celebrate its ten-year anniversary, Fuzz Club Records are reissuing The Underground Youth’s 2011 ‘Low Slow Needle’ EP on 10” vinyl with remastered audio. ‘Low Slow Needle’s hauntingly minimal, neo-psychedelic melancholy provides a more lo-fi snapshot of the now-Berlin-based band’s earlier days – when The Underground Youth was more of a DIY solo endeavour for Blackpool-born musician Craig Dyer, as opposed to the much-adored, full-band, international touring force that it is now. Looking back on ‘Low Slow Needle’, Dyer said: “The EP was recorded in September 2011, I had just returned to the UK from St. Petersburg where Olya [now drummer in The Underground Youth] and I had just got married.

Olya had to stay in Russia to finalise her paperwork before we would move into our first home together in Manchester. It was a difficult time, being apart after just getting married, and so I distracted myself by working on these songs that would become the Low Slow Needle EP. It was sort of my love letter to that period, looking back and also looking to the future. I worked closely with mine and Olya's friend in St. Petersburg, Daria Xenofontova, who gave her beautiful voice to my words and featured on three of the most popular songs on the EP, 'Midnight Lust', 'Addiction' and 'Blue'. These three songs still remain popular with our fans, who still request we play them live to this day.” When compared with the cinematic folk-noir heard on the band’s tenth album, the newly-released ‘The Falling’ (2021), what we find here captures a more stark and stripped-back The Underground Youth as the project was about to come out of its embryonic phase: “All five tracks were recorded in my bedroom and I really wanted to strip back the sound, to give a romantic feel of that period for me. To consider it 10 years on, it feels like the beginning to the next step of the journey, my life in Manchester with Olya, making contact with Casper at Fuzz Club and signing up with the label (this came just after the release of Low Slow Needle) and us putting together the first incarnation of TUY's live band (again this followed the release of the EP). So, in a way, this record marked the end of the first era of The Underground Youth, and in doing so, paved the way for the next.”

TRACK LISTING

1) Midnight Lust
2) On Your Screen
3) Addiction
4) Blue
5) Witchcraft