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The 11 best Underworld songs
Ranking the greatest Underworld tracks ahead of their landmark return to Creamfields this August
Underworld’s impact is hard to overstate. The British duo were one of the biggest contributors to bringing 90s underground rave and techno music into the mainstream consciousness.
Rick Smith’s production was game-changing. He treated studio gear and live consoles like jazz instruments, introducing electronic music to human spontaneity. Karl Hyde’s vocals have always sounded like someone live-streaming their inner monologue. Way ahead of their time, that rough and ready, part diary-entry, part live-party approach to lyrics and delivery has since become a staple across newer dance genres.
Underworld helped shape the idea that electronic music didn’t just belong to DJs, it could be performed like a live band with real presence and character. That ethos impacted Daft Punk, Basement Jaxx, Chemical Brothers even acts like Radiohead as they moved further into an electronic sound.
More than three decades since Underworld’s debut, they remain as relevant as ever, recently collaborating with newer names like KI/KI and Kettama. Honestly, what I would have given to be at that Ally Pally show when Fred again.. brought out Mike Skinner and Underworld to perform ‘Born Slippy .NUXX’.
Live, Underworld’s shows feel less like sets of songs and more like a lucid journey, constantly evolving. It’s something every self-confessed raver has to experience at least once. And with Creamfields coming up this Summer, here’s our pick of Underworld’s best 11 tunes.
11. ‘Juanita: Kiteless : To Dream of Love’
‘Juanita : Kiteless : To Dream of Love’ is Underworld’s undisputed epic. Stretching past 16 minutes it’s like a guided meditation for the rave. Pounding techno rhythms juxtapose against ambient breathers. Distorted spoken-word vocals preface moments of genuine euphoria. It’s a journey. Released on their 1996 album Second Toughest In The Infants, it showed electronic music could be just as ambitious and cinematic as rock. Constantly shifting moods without ever losing momentum, ‘Juanita : Kiteless : To Dream of Love’ is one that stays on high rotation for cardio days. The kind of track that completely pulls you into its world; it’s not just a song, it’s the whole damn rave.
10. ‘Scribble’
‘Scribble’ sits right up there with my favourite drum & bass records ever. Yep. Underworld didn’t just dabble in the genre, they nailed it (with some help from drum & bass heavyweight High Contrast). Featuring on their 2010 album Barking, ‘Scribble’ wasn’t entirely new when it dropped. It evolved from the live fan favourite ‘You Do Scribble,’ which had been surfacing in sets for years earlier.
The track is all uplifting keys, rolling rhythms and fragile optimism. Karl Hyde’s reassuring vocals about being okay give just enough emotional surrender to sneak past your defences and hit you straight in the chest. It’s the sort of track that makes you want to put your hands up, close your eyes, and just feel the beating heart of connection on a floor-filled rave.
9. ‘Shudder / King Of Snake’
Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’ but make it Underworld. ‘King Of Snake’ is 70s disco dragged through a 90s rave. Built around Summer’s iconic bassline, it’s undulating acid house, whirring filters and jittery percussion. The earlier version was called ‘Shudder’, which fits the skittish, unstable pulse of the track. As it developed, it became ‘King Of Snake’, matching the slithering, hypnotic movement underneath. When I think of grainy camcorder rave footage from the 90s, this is the song playing in my head. Released in 1999 on Beaucoup Fish, it wasn’t about big drops or hooks made for viral content. Unpretentious, unfiltered records like this had one purpose, and that was to simply pull you deeper into the groove. Karl Hyde’s scattered vocals drift in and out like half thoughts you can never quite grab, your brain buffers while everything underneath keeps pushing forward with machine-like precision.
8. ‘Two Months Off’
‘Two Months Off’ was Underworld coming back in the early 2000s. A song literally about taking a break and coming back refreshed, it’s a little bit meta. The dance landscape had shifted significantly around Underworld, and instead of trying to recreate the success they’d had throughout the 90s, they stepped into a new era. ‘Two Months Off’ is warm, euphoric, melodic, but still unmistakably them. There’s Hyde’s cut-up vocals tugging at something inside you, an insistent looping groove, and a simple idea stretched into something slightly surreal and all-consuming. The usual Underworld sense of movement is still there, just lighter this time, like a hug from a stranger on a dancefloor you don’t want to leave.
7. ‘Pearl’s Girl’
‘Pearl’s Girl’ feels like a slice of Underworld’s soul. Longform and trance-inducing. It captures the restless energy of 1990s UK rave culture better than almost anything else they made. A techno-breakbeat hybrid driven by racing drums, distorted synths, and Hyde’s chopped, drifting vocals flickering through the mix. It’s a little disorientating, like drifting through a dream that keeps changing shape, every room you walk into a different afterparty. Hazy and familiar, you know everyone but can’t quite remember how. ‘Pearl’s Girl’ turns soundscaping into an artform, repetition into feeling. It’s less about existing as a record and more about representing the rave in motion and that’s exactly why it’s been a centrepiece of Underworld’s live sets for decades.
6. ‘Rez’
‘Rez’ is Underworld’s blueprint. Released in 1993 as a standalone single, it didn’t require album context, it was out here doing its own thing, fully formed and rearing to go. Fans often identify ‘Rez’ as the moment Underworld really arrived. With an almost 10-minute run time, it’s an instrumental that tells an epic narrative through hypnotic gradual layering. Mixing elements of trance, techno and progressive house, it’s all gas, no brakes. No vocals, no distractions, just pure momentum and lift. ‘Rez’ makes you feel like you’re being carried forward. You don’t know where you’re going, but you’re locked in regardless.
5. ‘Dark & Long (Dark Train)’
‘Dark & Long (Dark Train)’ is a deep-end masterpiece. Forget the release, this one is all about holding the tension. For Trainspotting fans, it’s almost as significant as ‘Born Slippy,’ accompanying Renton’s dark withdrawal scene. It also perfectly encapsulates Underworld’s psyche. They don’t really have a catalogue of finished tracks, more a rolling ecosystem of ideas, constantly shifting in form. ‘Dark & Long’ started as an atmospheric beat, slowly revealing its darker, mechanical undercurrent. Then the ‘Dark Train’ version became a live staple, stretching that idea into a cinematic journey. Originally released on Dubnobasswithmyheadman in 1994, ‘Dark & Long’ was long-form techno hypnosis before it became a thing.
4. ‘Moaner’
‘Moaner’ is about as cathartic as one of those rage rooms where they hazmat suit you up, hand you a hammer and tell you to go ahead and break stuff. If there’s one Underworld track that feels genuinely unhinged, it’s this one. Dangerous, frantic and completely relentless, there’s no euphoric peak to take the edge off here. With industrial synths, driving percussion and a pulsing bassline, ‘Moaner’ just keeps building (or spiralling) further into chaos. Karl Hyde’s frenzied vocals cut through the noise like someone stumbling out of a bad trip and into their own villain origin story.
It was made for the 1997 Batman & Robin movie which, retrospectively, is a weird pairing. While the film is widely considered to be one of the worst superhero films ever made, the track is an absolute masterpiece. But hey, when you get lemons, make lemonade? Later it got an official release on their 1999 album Beaucoup Fish. If I feel a menty b coming on, ‘Moaner’ makes for a fantastic soundtrack. Turn up the volume and embrace the madness.
3. ‘Jumbo’
‘Jumbo’ is a beautiful track. It’s almost ethereal. Instead of the escalating intensity Underworld has become renowned for, ‘Jumbo’ unfurls like a gorgeous flower. It’s a song essentially about those moments in life where everything just clicks into place. Released on their 1999 album Beaucoup Fish, Underworld had moved away from straight club functionality. They were about setting a mood, creating an atmosphere. With sampled tweeting birds woven into the production, ‘Jumbo’ is for that early-morning walk home, still wrapped in the night’s afterglow, drifting in a happy haze. It proved they could make softer prog house just as well as they could hard-hitting techno, something they’d go on to echo with tracks like ‘Two Months Off’ and ‘8 Ball’.
2. ‘Cowgirl’
‘Cowgirl’ might be Underworld’s greatest live track. Released on Dubnobasswithmyheadman in 1994, it’s all driving momentum and hypnotic synths. Karl Hyde’s disjointed vocals feel like the musical equivalent of 47 browser tabs open at once. It’s a little overwhelming. But it works. Of course it works. Live is where ‘Cowgirl’ becomes transcendent. The legendary ‘Rez/Cowgirl’ transition is biblical for Underworld fans. The moment the room decides, as one organism, to lose the plot entirely. ‘Cowgirl’ doesn’t just build energy, it completely consumes the room.
1. ‘Born Slippy .NUXX’
‘Born Slippy .NUXX’ isn’t just Underworld’s biggest anthem, it’s one of the defining records of the 1990s. Fans heard the pounding rhythm, the euphoric synths, and the chant for “lager, lager, lager” and mistook it for a party anthem, in reality Hyde actually wrote it as a cry for help. Struggling with alcoholism, he was recounting a bender pushed far past its limits. Drifting from Soho to the train home, his fragmented thoughts pull you into the intoxication and paranoia. Now fused to Trainspotting, the track sits closer to its original meaning culturally: a record about addiction and self-destruction disguised as euphoria. But its power goes way beyond the film. It’s one of the cornerstones of rave culture itself. Cross-generational dynamite that still detonates the second those synths come in.
