The Knife
Silent Shout

The Knife refused to play live for a long time. They said it's a throwback to the old days of rock 'n' roll, and not something that belongs to the digital age in which they find themselves living. Maybe they felt that perfection is only attainable in the studio, and that live replication is a dilution of that. They are all about perfection, and purity. They don't even like doing band photographs, taking the opportunity instead to "dress up like the music"... dark, brooding, mysterious, serious and oddly comical.

The costumes for the Silent Shout shoot would be interesting. Swathes of underwater-blue velvet perhaps, hanging from their outstretched arms, eyes shining under a heavy hood... or maybe bright flashes of cityscape neon, motorway floodlights flashing by against the black midnight sky. Or even the dim glow of a lamp bulb at some Berlin house party, light falling onto the face of a lonely girl sinking into the sofa and wishing she could leave. The synth alternates between attention grabbing treble and sunken bass, the vocal cold and robotic, but intriguing and insistent. This sounds like late night, and very early morning - cold air and slow revelations.

It's not an obvious pop single like Heartbeats, their most well-known song to date (partly due to the success of Jose Gonzalez's far inferior acoustic cover version). But then, very little is obvious about The Knife. And that makes them all the more interesting.