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The Knife’s 15 Greatest Songs

We look back at the Knife’s catalogue to compile a list of their very best tracks.

The Knife’s 15 Greatest Songs

Though bittersweet, the Knife’s decision earlier this year to call it quits after 15 years seemed like a sensible conclusion to a musical career that was quickly resembling a runaway mine car. After all, where else could Karin Andersson and Olof Dreijer take a project predicated on such reckless abandon? The only thing stunning about this bit of news was the tidiness of the announcement, or that the Knife bothered with any announcement at all.

Formed in 1999 by the Swedish siblings, the Knife released their underrated self-titled debut in 2001 and made their breakthrough two years later with Deep Cuts, an album of tawdry, neon-soaked excess that spawned their biggest hit, the joyous “Heartbeats.” Following the post-rave phantasmagoria of 2006’s acclaimed Silent Shout, the duo spent the next seven years largely absent from the music scene (with the exception of 2010’s Darwinian electro-opera Tomorrow, In a Year). They returned last year with Shaking the Habitual, which was either remarkably ahead of its time or antiquated in stone. Where else could they go from there except to honorably fall on their swords?

The Knife began their final round of shows last night in Stockholm, then follow that with five dates across Europe, culminating on November 8th in Reykjavik at Iceland Airwaves. To celebrate, we took a look back at the Knife’s catalogue to compile a list of their very best tracks.


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15. “You Make Me Like Charity”

Offering a brief glimpse into the ghoulish hedonism that would characterize the Knife’s later output, “You Make Me Like Charity” devolves from cheeky electro-pop into seething vocoder-afflicted anxiety. The traumatized, repetitive mantra of its chorus continues to resonate long after the jubilant Eurodisco of Deep Cuts has concluded.


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14. “I Just Had to Die”

Most of the Knife’s self-titled debut can be generously described as well-behaved in comparison to its unhinged offspring. With the understated “I Just Had to Die,” Andersson attains a level of vocal poignancy she would again exhibit years later on her mesmerizing Fever Ray album, shining a nostalgic shade of optimism on a song that chronicles both bittersweet memories and the foresight of our inevitable demise.

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13. “Networking”

The Knife unleashes their own brand of conversion therapy with “Networking,” a menacing barrage of quivering beats and gruesome taunts, brutally pummeling the listener for almost seven minutes. These are the unbridled sounds of Andersson and Dreijer at their most thoroughly indoctrinating.


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12. “The Captain”

The Knife takes full advantage of the hazy industrial soundscape that begins “The Captain,” baiting the listener into calm sanctuary after Silent Shout’s harrowing opener. Yet, halfway through, as Andersson’s vocals crawl out from beneath the drone like some spectral parade, we’re jolted from the warmth of our serene stupor into icy discombobulation. It’s the last time we’d be foolish enough to feel so comfortable.


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11. “Stay Out Here”

Written in collaboration with Emily Roysdon and Light Asylum’s Shannon Funchess, the house-inspired “Stay Out Here” is a freakish, shape-shifting bullet train, threatening to short-circuit and burst into flames at any moment while never losing sight of its destination: the apocalyptic storm just over the horizon.


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10. “We Share Our Mothers’ Health”

Pre-2006, very little in the Knife’s oeuvre could have prepared one for “We Share Our Mothers’ Health,” a garish, jack-in-the-box of synthy goth-pop. Throughout Silent Shout, Andersson’s vocals lean heavily on playful, obscured mystique, and nowhere is that more apparent than during this song’s bouncy, hellraising chorus. A spellbinding bit of dance-floor revelry, “We Share Our Mothers’ Health” is the Knife at their both enthralling and unapologetically deranged.

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9. “För Alla Namn Vi Inte Får Använda”

Earlier this year, the Knife provided music for the antinational cabaret Europa Europa, a movement focusing on the human-rights injustices committed by Sweden and the European Union. An intoxicating pastiche of the duo’s sensibilities over the past decade, the sounds of “För Alla Namn Vi Inte Får Använda” (translated as “For all the names we cannot use”) range from the wide-eyed millennial indietronica of Deep Cuts to Shaking the Habitual’s aggressive tribal beats.


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8. “Marble House”

By the mid-aughts, the Knife had grown increasingly disinterested in keeping up traditional human appearances in public, updating their presence through a variety of masks, cloaks, and, in one case, graphic face-melting makeup. This rejection of conventional imagery extended to the lurid but elegant “Marble House,” a hypnotic duet of sweeping, phantasmal romance. Andersson and Drejier don’t so much perform the song as haunt whoever chooses to listen to it.


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7. “Raging Lung”

Relentless kettledrums anchor a 10-minute orchestral nightmare of strings and horns layered atop Andersson’s witchy serenade of omnipresent hisses. Punctuated by one of the Knife’s more shout-along choruses (“What a difference/A little difference would make!” proclaims Andersson in a confounding though inspired nod to Fugazi’s “Blueprint,” following rants against the hidden evils of Western society), the exhilaration of hearing “Raging Lung” for the first time is rivaled only by the disorientation of revisiting it again and again.


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6. “A Tooth for an Eye”

One of the more striking aspects of Shaking the Habitual’s opening track is how often Dreijer chooses to subvert traditional melody in favor of dissonant, polyrhythmic excess. All of the elements within this kaleidoscopic swirl of steel drums, wood blocks, and percolating synths serve a common purpose: the band making good from the get-go on their final album’s commitment to deconstruct established norms and convention.

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5. “Pass This On”

“Pass This On” could be viewed as the shinier, but no less eerily seductive counterpart to Silent Shout’s “Marble House.” The main difference here, other than the signature calypso-inspired glee, is that Dreijer’s vocals don’t make an appearance, rendering what promises to be a sultry duet both open-ended and unrequited. “I’m in love/With your brother/Yes I am,” laments Andersson, her only response an eventual chorus of demonically warped vocals. An alluring, debaucherous, and faintly evil four minutes of pop perfection.


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4. “Silent Shout”

The throbbing pulse that ignites “Silent Shout” doubles as an ominous harbinger for the Grand Guignol madness lying in wait on the album of the same name. A frigid, tech-noir raver of monstrous bass, pitch-shifted whispers, and layer upon layer of elusive, core-rattling beats, “Silent Shout” is the moment the Knife became what goes bump in the night. The song channels synthetic alienation and lament with such laconic precision that it only could have been achieved by humans, possessed or otherwise.


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3. “Full of Fire”

The power of suggestion has fueled the Knife’s aesthetic since their inception. But the outright brutalism of “Full of Fire”—a rabid banger so ferocious that it ultimately turns its teeth on itself when it has nowhere else to go—aims to confront, bully, and abuse our very notion of what electronic music should sound like, leaving us writhing in dumbfounded pleasure on some grimy subterranean dance floor.


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2. “A Colouring of Pigeons”

Tomorrow, In a Year, a collaboration with Mt. Sims and Planningtorock, remains a bit of an experimental slog, but “A Colouring of Pigeons” is a breathtaking dose of awe-inspiring bombast where both ambition and grasp align flawlessly. Otherworldly operatic samples set the stage for a colossal blend of orchestral arpeggios and crackling percussion. The proceedings evolve to take on an air of wondrous melancholy as Andersson’s voice drifts into range, aching with existential sorrow.

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1. “Heartbeats”

A euphoric blend of tropical beats, flamboyant synths, and rousing vocals, the lead track from Deep Cuts is a flawless encapsulation of tender-hearted pop escapism. From the stirring revelry of the chorus (“To call for hands from above/To lean on/Wouldn’t be good enough/For me”) to the Knife’s now-familiar penchant for grim apprehension (“And you/You knew the hand of the devil/And you/You kept us awake with wolves teeth”), Andersson’s delivery conjures images of youthful whimsy while hinting at the distant unknowns of impending adulthood.

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