New releases last four weeks: Techno (All)

Review: British heavyweights Underworld delivered one of the 90s' most enduring dance albums with their second LPivisionary, sprawling, and wired with tension. This 2025 reissue does it justice, pressed onto heavyweight vinyl with a half-speed cut that gives its deep, hypnotic sonics fresh bite. From the moment 'Juanita : Kiteless : To Dream Of Love' opens with glitchy insistence and locked grooves, it's clear how ahead of its time this was. The glitch-techno swirl of 'Banstyle/Sappy's Curry' and the growling 'Rowla' nod to Sheffield and Detroit in equal measure, while 'Pearl's Girl' pulses with breakbeat aggression and warped vocals, its grit sharpened here by the remaster. 'Confusion the Waitress' and 'Air Towel' show the band at their most meditative, layering ambience and submerged breaks into something closer to sound design than club tool. Even 'Blueski' and 'Stagger'ishorter, sketch-like piecesifeel essential to the album's industrial-sublime mood. Still fiercely modern, still haunted, still euphoric. An artefact of the past that belongs squarely in the now.

Review: Karl Hyde and Rick Smith continue to offer-up remastered CD reissues of gems from Underworld's vast back catalogue. Here they return to 1996's Second Toughest In The Infants, a set - co-produced with then third member Darren Emerson - which cemented their growing status as one of British electronic music's true headline attractions. While not as admired as its predecessor, it remains a fantastic full-length excursion - an inventive and frequently inspired collection of peak-time-ready epics that borrow liberally from progressive house, techno and spacey drum & bass (see 'Banstyle/Sappy's Curry'). It also contains a number of genuine stunners, not least the bustling 'Confusion The Waitress', the acid-fired insanity of 'Rawla', and the trance-inducing early morning hypnotism of 'Air Towel'.