Berlin-based post-punk band The Underground Youth, led by Blackpool-born musician and author Craig Dyer, are releasing their new single ‘Calliope’. Following recent lead single ‘You (The Feral Human Thunderstorm)’ and ‘One Of The Dreamers’, it’s the third and final preview of their incoming twelfth studio album ‘Décollage’ ahead of its April 4th release on Fuzz Club.
Out everywhere today, Dyer says of ‘Calliope’: “Calliope is the Greek muse of epic poetry, the narrator here questions why worshipping at her feet has not delivered them a masterpiece. They question why people criticise creative originality and why we can’t simply find comfort in the pleasure of creating art, rather than critiquing it. The song builds slowly towards a crescendo of trip-hop infused walls of layered arrangements and features additional vocals by Gloria de Oliveira.”
Self-written, recorded and produced by Dyer, ‘Décollage’ is an exercise in artistic deconstruction in both name and form, marking a decisive musical shift for The Underground Youth. “‘Décollage is the art of creating an image by ripping, tearing away or removing pieces of an original existing work’. My idea was to apply this technique to music”, he explains. “I built walls of static coated hip-hop drum samples, layers of Lee Hazlewood style string arrangements and Serge Gainsbourg inspired mellotron melodies, then I began tearing away at these beautiful, chaotic walls of noise.”
The result, Dyer says, is “a trip-hop infused soundtrack to a collection of lyrics dealing with adoration, ancestry, originality, hallucinations of revolution and a hope that something better can be born from the ashes of the horror that exists in our world.” From moments of ghostly minimalism to sweeping crescendos of noise and melody, there is a shadowy, dreamlike quality to the songs here. If its predecessor ‘Nostalgia’s Glass’ (2023) mined a more introspective nostalgia, ‘Décollage’ feels more hauntological in nature – tearing apart and re-transforming what once was in search of a future left spinning from reel-to-reel on warped and distorted old tape.