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Artist
Insides are a South Coast outlier who never fitted neatly into any one 90s UK lane, which is partly why they still feel like a secret. The duo is Kirsty Yates on vocals and bass and Julian Tardo on guitar and programming, formed around Brighton after their earlier project Earwig. They emerged just as British indie was fragmenting into shoegaze, trip hop and post rave afterglow, and they built a version of pop that borrowed the emotional directness of singer songwriting but set it inside loops, samplers and slow motion pulse. Their debut album Euphoria, released on 4AD’s Guernica imprint in 1993, is the record that explains the cult. It is intimate and unnerving at the same time: soft, close vocals surrounded by eerily clean electronics, guitar treatments that drift like vapour trails, and grooves that keep moving even when the songs feel half asleep. Neil Kulkarni later argued for it as pure pop innovation rather than any rock genre game, and his interview with the band captures how deliberate the mix of seduction and unease was from the start. Insides then made one of their boldest moves with Clear Skin in 1994, a single long piece that leans into cyclic repetition and trance. In the Quietus interview, Tardo and Yates describe it as an extension of what they had done in Earwig, pushing repetition to extremes, with reference points like Steve Reich and Kraftwerk. They also describe how it grew out of a live idea and how the production became a technical undertaking for the