Dancing with ghosts of the future
By the time Emerging in 2002, Two Months Off had already secured Underworld’s position as electronic alchemists. Born Slippy .NUXX gave the 1990s its chemical comedown hymn, scoring both the highs and the hollow aftermath. Still, this song didn’t come from either exhaustion or joy. It came from far off from regrouping. Darren Emerson had left the band. Rick Smith and Karl Hyde had been separated for a while. What came back was something warmer, looser, yet pulsing, touched by sunlight.
Like a system returning online, the track starts softly. Rising expectation arpeggios tick but not hurriedly layered. Karl Hyde’s voice seems to be a transmission from somewhere just outside of reach, personal yet broken. “You bring light in,” he echoes, half-observation, half-mantra. Like always with Underworld, the words are more impressionistic than storylike. not tales but glimpses of experiences. Emotionless plot.
This has a sense of balance that distinguishes it from previous works. Although never hostile, the rhythms are clean. The synthy lines inhale. The build is patient. It opens rather than explodes. It’s dance music, yes, but not for the shadowy warehouse corner. Open-air music, music for clarity and movement, is this. Walking ahead rather than fleeing from something. Two Months Off was a masterclass in moderation and tone following years marked by more extreme techno or trance bombast.
We wanted to make music that felt like sunlight on your face after a longnight out.
(Karl Hyde, The Face, 2002)
Contrast has always been excellent among underworlds, between order and anarchy, between body-moving rhythms and abstract poetics. This song perfectly captures that. It seems to be a track that is aware time has gone by, that power has changed, yet the beat is still present. At concerts, in headphones, on city streets, the song grew very popular. It seemed contemporary without chasing fad and nostalgic without diving into cliché.
Exactly that reluctance to yell made Two Months Off connect in its time. It provided release sans drama. It showed electronic music could grow old, could reflect, could breath. Underworld discovered a different frequency in a year defined by noise, suspicion, and overproduction. And they reminded us that space is sometimes the most potent sound of all, even in dance music.
