Legendary Electronic Duo Underworld To Play First Aussie Shows In Seven Years This April

Seminal British electronic duo Underworld will make their long-awaited return to antipodean shores this April for a pair of high-profile local shows, their first such outing in seven years.

The two-piece unit of Karl Hyde and Rick Smith will break their Australian drought with an outing at the Sydney Opera House on Tuesday 11 April before heading south to perform at Arts Centre Melbourne the next night.

The pair will be touting their most recent album, the acclaimed, Grammy-nominated Barbara Barbara, We Face A Shining Future, which landed in March last year and disrupted another dry spell, being their first new work since 2010's Barking.

The tour comes concurrent with a renewed sense of notoriety for the band, with their influential 1996 hit Born Slippy .NUXX — which nabbed the #65 placing on 2009's publicly voted triple j Hottest 100 Of All Time — echoing its success of 20 years ago as part of the original Trainspotting soundtrack by being included on the soundtrack for new sequel T2 as Slow Slippy.

The Sydney performances follow a long history of the Opera House embracing modern tunes, with the Sydney Opera House's Head of Contemporary Music, Ben Marshall, enthusing of the band's "searing amalgam of overwhelming ambition, cerebral arrangements and visceral execution" and storied career:

"Underworld's 25-plus-year catalogue displays a consistent integrity and vision that towers over most of their peers. Having proved itself capable of doubling as a bassbin-slash-dancefloor of giant proportions for Disclosure, Caribou, Flying Lotus, Hot Chip and Four Tet, expect the Concert Hall to deliver an experience to remember the night Underworld take the stage."

Tickets for the Melbourne show are on pre-sale now, running through till 9am Thursday, 23 February, at which point general-release tickets go on sale.

For further details on both shows, see theGuide.

Update, 22 February: An earlier version of this story billed the Sydney show as part of the 2017 Vivid LIVE program. This was included in error and is not the case.