The Knife

Essential Albums

  • Silent Shout
    Silent Shout
    Silent Shout

    At once massively influential and totally inimitable, The Knife’s third studio album, Silent Shout, made a meteor-sized impression upon its arrival in 2006—a time in which electronic and dance-oriented sounds were starting to commingle with indie-pop’s wistfulness, anticipating the rough-and-tumble thump of bloghouse that was to come. Silent Shout felt and still feels like a true shock to the system, its dark-hued and utterly gothic spin on electronic pop a stark deviation from The Knife’s 2003 predecessor Deep Cuts. That album had earned the group—consisting of Swedish siblings Karin and Olof Dreijer—plenty of attention, thanks to the buoyant single “Heartbeats”, as well as a blog-viral cover from dusky folk countryman José González. If The Knife were previously known for bouncy, slightly off-kilter melodies, Silent Shout represents the duo pouring jet-black oil over their shiny synth sounds, with drum machines ricocheting around Karin’s otherworldly, digitally processed vocals. It’s music that is scary as it is beautiful—like exploring a dark castle by candlelight. The music across these 11 lushly iridescent tracks is as inviting as it is totally strange, and to date, no one’s struck Silent Shout’s alchemical balance: This is an album featuring the psychedelic rush of trance, the clinical pull of German techno, the anguished creep of goth rock and the vibrancy of steel-drum music. And there’s a remarkable tonal breadth on Silent Shout, which features everything from aching monster-movie balladry (“Marble House”) to four-alarm dance-floor ragers (“We Share Our Mothers’ Health”) to wispy, ethereal electro-pop (“Still Light”). Plenty of musicians have since employed bits and pieces of Silent Shout’s framework to great effect, but none have come close to nailing the specific pop weirdness that The Knife achieve here—and that includes The Knife themselves, as the siblings (both separately and together) have continued to chart new and wild territory branching off of this landmark achievement of an album.

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About The Knife

Swedish electro-pop duo The Knife were one of the early 21st century’s most exciting acts, crafting perfect pop songs and sprawling experimental records with daring and vigour. Siblings Karin and Olof Dreijer began making music together in 1999. Their 2001 self-titled debut featured Karin’s pitch-shifted vocals, which allowed the band to explore and critique norms of gender; in 2003, they released Deep Cuts, couching subversive lyrics in sticky hooks and danceable grooves. Eventually, that record’s longing “Heartbeats” became one of the biggest synth-pop songs of the decade, but the fame it imposed on the Dreijers—including The Knife’s first live shows—led them to outfit themselves in elaborate masks. In 2006, they released Silent Shout, which immersed itself in anti-patriarchal politics while embracing ’90s dance genres like techno and trance. Karin and Olof released solo projects in the years that followed, and they also cowrote an opera based on Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species with Mt. Sims and Planningtorock, which was released as the album Tomorrow In a Year. The Knife returned in 2013 with Shaking the Habitual, a heady deep dive into climate change, class politics and feminism; the following year they announced their breakup.

ORIGIN
Gothenburg, Sweden
FORMED
1999
GENRE
Electronic

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