6 Underground (song)

Composition

The song samples horns and a harp melody from "Golden Girl", a track from the 1964 James Bond film Goldfinger. The Nellee Hooper version repeatedly samples the phrase "a-one two" from De La Soul's "Breakadawn". Chris Corner described the song as being about death in a small-town environment, expressing a yearning to escape what he called a "northern industrial shithole."

Critical reception

Simon Price of Melody Maker called the song "cliche of the year," comparing it to post-Portishead and post-Garbage styles. In December 1996, Melody Maker ranked "6 Underground" number 30 on its "Singles of the Year" list, describing it as "smokier than Bill Hicks' bedroom." In 2017, Billboard ranked it number 48 on its list of "The 100 Greatest Pop Songs of 1997," crediting Nellee Hooper's remix with making the song "unshakeable."

Music video

The music video, directed by Toby Tremlett, debuted on 14 January 1997 and uses the Nellee Hooper edit. It features Kelli Dayton singing while sitting in a dentist chair in a dark room, spinning around, and later walking slowly through the space. Several smaller lit rooms with oval windows within the larger room show various scenes: a man in black practicing poses, a woman in a nightgown vacuuming, a young woman in a red tie and black skirt posing by a chair, a toddler in a costume pouring and tossing spaghetti, and an overweight man eating spaghetti in a recliner.

A band member pours out a can of worms. The other band members often lurk behind Dayton, sometimes standing in one of the small lit rooms. At the end, the people in the smaller rooms freeze, the band poses at the dentist chair, and the lights go out.

Usage in media

The song appears in the Beverly Hills, 90210 episode "Friends in Deed" from its eighth season and in the 1997 film The Saint. A remix titled "Six Underground (The Umbrellas Of Ladywell Mix #2)" is used in the 1998 film Can't Hardly Wait. It served as the main theme for the US primetime soap opera Titans in 2000, and was used in Kyle Mooney's 2024 comedy film Y2K. The song also plays near the end of episode 7 of season 1 of The Testaments (2026).