How The Knife Became The Weirdest Band In Pop

April is obviously too early to be making annual lists and charts, but at least one thing is certain: it would take an awful lot to top The Knife’s Shaking The Habitual as the weirdest album of the year. The Dreijer siblings specialise in crafting strange and unsettling songs, but their new album goes way beyond anything they’ve done before. Shaking The Habitual – which is streaming via Pitchfork right now – is bone-chillingly, hairs standing up on the back of your neck-ingly, being dragged through a haunted forest in a sack full of screaming cats-ingly weird.

Somewhere between posing for photos as brother-and-sister gymnasts, accepting awards in creepy face-melting masks, and attempting to dismantle the capitalist system, The Knife became the weirdest band in contemporary pop. So how did they get here?

The signs had been there all along…

The Knife’s big breakthrough came around a decade ago, with their single ‘Heartbeats’. It was a near-perfect Swedish pop song; a swooning, melancholy ode to love with a synth hook a hundred storeys high. José González released a gentle, acoustic cover that found its way onto a million and one chill-out compilations. The accompanying album, Deep Cuts, was front-loaded with similar synth-pop tracks, but things took a turn for the ‘what the hell is happening?’ in the second half.

Case in point: ‘The Cop’. An excruciating 45 seconds of guttural growling and industrial noise, its lyrics included “I am a cop / shut up / I piss in your month”. Further case in point: ‘Hangin’ Out’. I can’t even, so if you’re not familiar with the song, find it on YouTube and then just try to have a sound night’s sleep afterwards. Safe to say that if you chucked the album on for a bit of background music at General Pants, you were in for a rude surprise.

…but then Silent Shout happened.

When Silent Shout came out in 2006, everyone lost their collective shit. The album took their sound on a journey down a nightmarish rabbit hole. The lyrics, when you could make them out amid the bleeps and beats, were all about fear and paranoia. Voice modulating software twisted Karin’s distinctive vocals in all sorts of directions, to the point where she sounded like an old man, a ghost, and a spooky forest elf of some kind, often all at once.

The Silent Shout era solidified the Dreijer siblings as two of music’s most fascinating outsiders. Unlike many bands on the make, they didn’t seem all that hungry for your approval. They kept to themselves, only granting interviews when they felt like it, and they almost never toured. It became clear at this point that The Knife weren’t that band you see on festival bills every other year; if you were one of the select few to see their elaborate, bizarre live show, the experience really meant something.

They took a long break, but maintained the weirdness.

The Knife took their time making a follow-up to Silent Shout. In the interim, the pair took on various solo projects, and collaborated with Planningtorock on an opera about the life of Charles Darwin. Karin’s band, Fever Ray, released an outstanding self-titled album in 2009. It was less strange and harsh than Silent Shout, but highlighted her beautifully haunting vocals against a sparse synth background.

Of course, this being Karin Dreijer, it was necessary to maintain a certain air of ‘what the hell just happened?’ Thus, check out this clip from a 2010 award show, when Dreijer showed up dressed head to toe in whatever this costume is, and gave an acceptance speech that consisted of indecipherable grunting sounds. Because, guys, what even IS an awards show? Acclaim and success are all so fake, y’know?

Then things got cryptic…

At the end of 2011, The Knife made a post on their website, urging fans to end discrimination against Romani people in Europe and sign a petition for Romani housing rights. The post included a casual remark about the imminent release of a new album. When the single, ‘Full Of Fire’, finally arrived at the beginning of this year, it was even more bracing and uncompromising than people expected.

The song was a nine-minute epic whose heavy beats sounded like the oppressive forward-march of global capitalism. Nobody really expected another ‘Heartbeats’, but ‘Full Of Fire’ promised an album even more twisted in tone and style than Silent Shout. The Marit Östberg-directed video for the song added to the air of mystery, playing with themes of domesticity, conformity and the rise of creepy little people in hoodies.

Then the new album arrived and everyone was like, ‘huh?’

For one thing, the artwork is… unconventional. The band opted for a hot pink background, so bright it all but melts your eyes from their sockets. It literally looks like it was copy and pasted together with MS Paint, and it includes a crude, handmade comic strip which lays down a manifesto for ending extreme wealth. If the artwork is intentionally ugly, the music on the album is likewise so.

Parsing the critical reviews for Shaking The Habitual, you come across words like ‘disquieting’, ‘structureless’, ‘aggressive’ and ‘unsettling’. One review called the album ‘an ordeal.’ These words all have pretty obvious negative connotations, but most critics have rated the album highly. If a consensus is forming, it’s that Shaking The Habitual is odd, angry and sort of unlistenable… but still a very good album.

What about the songs?

Oh yeah, good question. The album opens with ‘A Tooth For An Eye’ and ‘Full Of Fire’, both stark, rhythm-heavy songs that pair Dreijer’s vocals with a variety of disembodied moans and squeals. ‘A Cherry On Top’ is probably the least likely song ever to bear that name; it opens with five minutes of howling, wheezing ambience, before dropping in a series of clanging sounds and a terrifying treated vocal.

‘Wrap Your Arms Around Me’ features woozy synths that seem specifically designed to bring on seasickness and nausea, while ‘Networking’ features a series of bleeps and bloops that hark back to the stark Teutonic sounds of DJ Hell or Ellen Allien. ‘Without You My Life Would Be Boring’ sounds like it was recorded by a group of demented Moomintroll-like creatures dancing around a camp fire late at night, but it’s still somehow the most approachable and poppy song on the album.

Then there’s the 19-minute ambient one…

Dropping 19 minutes of near-total silence right in the middle of your album is not the most obvious move, right? Not if you’re The Knife. ‘Old Dreams Waiting To Be Realized’ is essentially just that. It sits there like a great big blob of ambient nothing, daring you to skip over it or delete it from your playlist. It’s as much a manifesto as the crudely-drawn comic strip accompanying the album. ‘Pop music is so fake and bourgeois,’ it says. ‘Enjoy these 19 minutes of nothing and then let’s smash the system.’

Oh, right.

Shaking The Habitual is long and dense as hell. It’s not the kind of album you can really appreciate in one listen… or two, or three, or four. It’s a towering achievement, and it takes the uncompromising sound of Silent Shout and pushes it even further towards the edge. It’s totally unconcerned with hooks or hits, and there’s a constant sense that Karin and Olof don’t really give a stuff what you think. They’re not being friendly or playing nice, and they still won’t be coming to a festival near you any time soon.

Will Shaking The Habitual stand the test of time? It’s way too soon to say. Are Karin and Olof a pair of stone-cold weirdos? Hell yes. And you’ve gotta love them for that.

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Alasdair Duncan is an author, freelance writer and video game-lover who has had work published in Crikey, The Drum, The Brag, Beat, Rip It Up, The Music Network, Rave Magazine, AXN Cult and Star Observer.