The Knife: Shaking The Habitual

When last we heard from Swedish brother-sister duo The Knife, they were turning critical heads with the icy, wholly progressive electronic triumph that was 2006’s Silent Shout. A gap of seven years might suggest a paucity of ideas or a prolonged period of indulgence. It can’t be the former; Shaking The Habitual is twice the length of its predecessor. This fourth outing is no shapeless folly to the gods of indulgence, either.

You might argue that 20-minute midway point ‘Old Dreams Waiting To Be Realised’ is little more than the kind of atmospheric, haunting synths and occasional metallic clangs that should soundtrack some ‘searching an abandoned spaceship’s hull by flashlight’ scene from an Alien rip-off, but in truth the tension it builds serves the songs around it beautifully. A breather of sorts, it follows the frantically demonic house of ‘Full Of Fire’ and deranged rave of ‘A Cherry On Top’, before itself giving way to the booming power of ‘Raging Lung’.
A surprise lurking around every corner, Shaking The Habitual is a masterpiece of suspense and release. It is also a magnificently rhythmic beast featuring more natural instrumentation than The Knife have dared explore before. Considering the sole collaboration between Karin Dreijer Andersson and her brother Olof in the last seven years was an opera on Charles Darwin, it’s nice to hear them thrive through adaptation and evolution. Flutes and karimbas abound, keys creep about, and Dreijer’s voice flits from zombified Polly Harvey roar to Bushian tenderness. Glitches, stomps, political sloganeering and silence — it all coalesces to form a mammoth creature that is both foreboding and magnetic. This leftfield record will be too visceral and impenetrable for some. Their loss. Would that more artists cut as deeply as The Knife.