The Knife, a Swedish electronic music group made up of siblings Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olof Dreijer, announced an upcoming live album that will be recorded at Terminal 5 in New York. The group started in 1999 along with the siblings’ own company, Rabid Records. The duo gained a global audience in 2003 with their album, Deep Cuts. In 2006, The Knife went on tour to promote their album Silent Shout. The pair have consistently worn masks in public and, despite having won multiple Swedish Grammis, refuse to attend any ceremonies. Each has operated as a solo artist under an alias. The group broke up in 2014 after completing the tour for the acclaimed album, Shaking The Habitual.
The Knife returned today. A band that has always refused to cooperate with the mainstream media now announces plans for a live album, released alongside a book of photographs from their 2014 tour. The group rarely made public appearances and only performed live for the first time in 2005, six years after forming. The Knife is a different kind of musical group. Their concerts rely heavily on the visual. They consider David Lynch and Donnie Darko as inspirations, along with musical acts like Sonic Youth and Le Tigre.
The photo album and DVD will be released with the Terminal 5 live album. The band released a statement about their plans for the album. The blurb, found on their website, discusses the ways in which the band has gone in a new direction for their sixth album.
“We both realized that the market probably expected us to produce something similar to our previous records. But we also knew that, to be able to make our sixth album, we were going to have to find a way to get back the joy and meaning of music-making: we needed to try something totally different.”
The group decided that to create a sixth album they would have to stop going about their career in a “result-oriented way” and have to focus on the joy of making music. They want the upcoming album to be overtly, yet tastefully, political. The group is doing things differently, that’s for sure.