Underworld, Photograph supplied
I wanna give you everything, I wanna give you energy
I wanna give a good thing
New Year’s at the Bowl was a brand new music festival. Three stages. More than 20 acts. Close to fifteen-thousand people. But in the weeks leading up to the event, when asked about my NYE plans, I’d just tell people I was going to see Underworld.
There was no way I was missing them – my friend and I had been living with regret since dragging our feet on seeing Karl Hyde and Rick Smith at the Sydney Opera House in the winter of 2024. Sydney was the only destination on Underworld’s two previous visits to Australia. They were last in Melbourne in 2017. I’m a relatively late convert to the UK act’s epic-scale, surrealist prog house and rave techno. But I now unequivocally count them as one of my favourite bands.
But hold up. Sidney Myer Music Bowl and Kings Domain is a wonderful festival site, access to which shouldn’t be taken for granted, and there was plenty to like about the rest of the New Year’s at the Bowl lineup. My two companions and I were too busy eating crackers and dip and trying to purge ourselves of guilt to catch Alex Kassian b2b Tornado Wallace, but Aldonna was spinning warm, analogue prog house 12″s on the Sundial stage when we arrived in the early evening.
Sundial was a circular stage among the pines, gums and fig trees to the south of the Bowl. It was a haven away from the large crowds elsewhere in the precinct, but the energy was a bit off during Dutch DJs Kamma and Masalo’s set. The dip in liveliness caused us to walk over to the Garden stage for a taste of Berlioz’s pleasing jazz house. Confidence Man were giving it everything in the Bowl, but their daggy theatrics weren’t enough to distract from the lightweight sound.
We made it back to Sundial in time to hear Prosumer play a beefy edit of Madonna’s “Into the Groove” before Roza Terenzi transitioned into The Chemical Brothers’ “Hey Boy Hey Girl”. Roza was the ideal forerunner to Underworld, playing textural and psychedelic prog, trance and 2-step.
The festival site was easy to navigate, and there was a distinct energy at all three stages, but I could also imagine a more tightly curated version of this festival that had Kassian, Terenzi, Aldonna and Prosumer on the main stage, creating a more unified experience building up to Underworld’s headline set.
As it was, Carl Cox played the penultimate set on the main stage, and he was all smiles as we counted down to midnight. After the subsequent firework display, Underworld walked out to the unmistakable three-chord progression of their biggest hit, “Born Slippy .NUXX”. It was a wonderful way to begin the year, friends hugging, couples kissing, and strangers nodding and smiling at one another. But it did make me wonder what they’d end with, given “Born Slippy” has been their set closer for decades.
I stopped thinking about the future as Hyde and Smith moved through various career highlights, including “Cowgirl”, which felt like an itchy tumble through fragrant rose bushes, and the transcendent “Dark & Long (Dark Train)”, a song that climbs and climbs but never runs out of oxygen.
Despite the nonsensical veneer of Karl Hyde’s lyrics, Underworld’s music is deeply spiritual. No track better embodies this than “Two Months Off”, which feels like a dream in which everything is moving at 2.5 speed but everyone and everything is pulsing with unselfconscious grace. Live, as its laser-beam synths rose and fell in perpetual circular motion and cowbells and bongos bubbled beneath one of Hyde’s most sincere and melodic toplines, I realised I no longer had any awareness of the weight of my limbs.
There were a few surprises in the mix. The band’s remix of “alleswirdgut” by Deutsch nu gabber crew Brutalismus 3000 kicked off an approximately 45-minute sequence of hammering techno kick drums and 140+ BPM proggy piano house, which included “and the colour red” from 2024’s Strawberry Hotel and the relatively obscure “Tin There” version of the 1996 single “Pearl’s Girl”. The hefty barrage culminated in the sermonising, machine funk ecstasy of “Moaner”, the sort of song that’d cause even the most well-behaved punter to start gurning.
The biggest surprise perhaps shouldn’t have been a surprise at all. After “Moaner”, Hyde wished us a happy New Year. “And now,” he said, “for something completely different,” before Smith reintroduced the three most joyful chords in the history of UK dance music. They played the full ten-minute version of “Born Slippy” this time, and it made perfect sense for the song to bookend their setlist, even if I did desperately want to hear “Jumbo” or “Rez”.
“Born Slippy” is the finest example of what writer Darran Anderson has called Underworld’s knack for using “electronic music as a catalyst to make life cinematic.”
Another two hours of Underworld still mightn’t have felt sufficient, but there was at least no ambiguity about whether coming to the Bowl for New Year’s was the right decision.
New Year’s at the Bowl took place at Sidney Myer Music Bowl, on the land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, on Wednesday 31 December.
Join our weekly newsletter
