After stirring up serious word-of-mouth in London’s underground scene and then vanishing almost as quickly as they arrived, UK duo The Itch are back—and they’re now officially labelmates with the likes of Confidence Man, DMA’S, and The Cure.
Simon Tyrie and Georgia Hardy, the elusive minds behind The Itch, have inked a global joint deal with Australian tastemakers I OH YOU and UK mainstays Fiction Records. To mark the occasion, they’ve released not one but two new tracks: the disorienting and delightfully meta ‘The Influencer’ and its twisted sibling ‘Co-Conspirator’.
The two songs were built from the same source material—identical stems, same drums, same key and BPM—but shape-shift into contrasting sonic worlds. Where ‘The Influencer’ leans toward glitchy electro-pop with a satirical bent, ‘Co-Conspirator’ reimagines the track as a shadowy club cut, like its cooler, moodier alter ego.
The visual approach is just as warped. Both videos are filmed in the same venue, but from very different timelines. ‘The Influencer’ gives dancer Joshua Hubbard free reign of an empty dancefloor, while the ‘Co-Conspirator’ visual is a collage of footage from a proper club night hosted by The Itch in the same space a week later. Think of it as Sliding Doors, but with strobes and synths.
It’s been exactly a year since their kaleidoscopic debut single ‘Ursula’—a 7-minute tribute to sci-fi icon Ursula K. Le Guin—earned them critical acclaim, sold-out gigs, and then, for reasons known only to them, a swift retreat into the shadows. Turns out they were busy DJing, producing, and—apparently—competing in mixed doubles tennis tournaments. Make of that what you will.
The Itch are re-emerging with a finely-tuned vision: dancefloor euphoria with a side of existential dread.
The Itch will perform their second headline show – and first in over a year – at Corsica Studios in London on 12th June.
Stream the new tracks HERE.
