“Not since Second Toughest in the Infants have I felt this buzzed about taking a record out,” enthused Karl Hyde back in June about the next chapter in Underworld’s long and storied career. That record is Barking, and it arrives at last on Friday 10 September.

After 2007’s Oblivion With Bells, Hyde and his long-time offsider Rick Smith wanted to try something new. For its follow-up, the duo hand-picked a diverse bunch of dance music types to offer ‘additional production’ on Barking. It’s an album that traverses the brooding dub influence of Appleblim and Komonazmuk to Mark Knight and D. Ramirez’s anthemic flourishes.

When inthemix was offered another chance to pick the brain of the irrepressible frontman, we were keen to hear how each collaboration came to be. Thankfully, Hyde was more than happy to oblige. Here’s what he had to say about Barking.

Bird 1, with Dubfire

“Dubfire was a suggestion by Steven Hall from the Junior Boys Own label, who we’ve been friends with for a long, long time. We’d been fans of Deep Dish, and Steve said we should check out what Dubfire is doing now and that he would be very sympathetic to these tracks in particular. We chose people very specifically for the tracks. Interestingly, we were doing some shows out in Romania together with Dubfire, so we could sit and talk and discover this is a really interesting guy. He’s a guitarist, he’s been in bands. He turned out to be a great bloke to work with.

“All these tracks were written in front of a live audience and developed in a live scenario. They were already connecting with people. But we were still searching for something; it was still ‘yes, but there’s more’. What happened when we worked with these people was that they sent back their initial response and it was like, “A-ha, this is the more we’ve been looking for”. Then we would enter into a dialogue.

“Dubfire is a really good example. When he first sent back Bird 1, some of the things he’d done were seemingly subtle but very significant. He kind of gave us the Underworld we were looking for.”

Always Loved A Film & Between Stars, with Mark Knight and D. Ramirez

“We knew about their sound from our collaboration with them on Downpipe the year before. We knew them as good people; really straight-forward, positive people. No complications. They were the only people that we invited round to the studio and played them everything and said, ‘Pick something you’d like to do’.

“They wanted to do Always Loved A Film and while they were in the studio with Rick, he played them Between Stars and they said, ‘Can we have a go at that as well!’

“A lot of the sounds that are contemporary today were contemporary when the first Underworld album appeared. Someone said to me when I was writing last year, you should really listen to the Underneath The Radar album [Underworld’s first record from 1988]. He said there are some cool sounds on that album that sound very contemporary. And that was an interesting bridge as a writer from where we came from to right now.”

Scribble, with High Contrast

“With Lincoln, he gave us quite a considerable reworking of You Do Scribble, with new melodies, beats and a different structure. At first listen, it was quite radical. As we listened, Rick said it’s a great instrumental and I think it’s finished, but why don’t you have a go at a new melody Karl? Sing a new tune. And we sent that back to Lincoln; it was a lot of backwards and forwards.”

Hamburg Hotel, with Appleblim & Komonazmuk

“It was a track that Rick wrote on a laptop in a hotel in Hamburg; it was as literal as that. It was a dubstep piece that he wrote and I’m really grateful that version is coming out too. We were listening to a lot dubstep at the time, and really digging Burial’s second album. We’d worked with Appleblim; he’d opened at a few shows for us here in London and as ever, Rick is just curious. He goes, ‘Yeah, it sounds great, but what would happen if we invite somebody to do their version?’”

Diamond Jigsaw, with Paul van Dyk

“ Diamond Jigsaw was quite an unusual track. In the beginning when I wrote it, it was Keith Richards goes to Dusseldorf and joins a techno band. It was sounding good, but it wasn’t sounding like Underworld. When we’d play it, everyone would say they loved that new tune, but Rick and I would say, ‘Yeah, but it doesn’t sound like us’. When we sent it to Paul van Dyk, what came back sounded like the ‘us’ that’s in our heads.”

Moon In Water, with High Contrast

“Lincoln was making it clear he wanted to break out from the sound he’s renowned for, and go beyond it. It was lovely to hear him take this on, because Moon In Water is another track of Rick’s that I’d absolutely loved. The voice on it is Danielle, who’s worked with us for the last ten years. We just hear people’s voices and go, ‘Come here, we need you in the studio!’ What High Contrast did with that I think is absolutely beautiful.”

Louisiana

“It’s the only one that just exclusively Rick and I did. It’s an interesting one, because I’d recorded the first verse and the chorus and it had sat in the archive. And Rick pulled it out when we were talking about making the record and said, ‘We need to finish this’. He suggested we become traditional songwriters and get together in the studio, just the two of us, and finish it. It was literally just him on piano with a drum machine and a microphone, and we’d meet every other day to try new versions.

“It was how we’d learned to work on the Breaking and Entering and Sunshine film scores. I had to sing the second verse exactly the same as I’d done the first verse; same state of mind, same mic position. It took weeks to work out. To me, it sounds like something that should be in a David Lynch film.”

And finally, the album’s lyrics

“People say little things sometimes, and they help often more than big things. Rick said, ‘It’d be really great if you could build a couple of little doors into your lyrics, just to let people in a little bit more’. And I really liked that picture. So I did try with this album to build a couple of little doors, rather than putting an obscure collection of words out there. There was a desire to do that, but a lot of these lyrics were taken from very different times. Everything from stuff written to notebooks years ago to words I thought of that day on the street.”

Barking is out 10 September through Shock Records. Read the album review on inthemix here.