If you haven’t heard The Knife’s new album Shaking the Habitual, we totally recommend giving it a listen. The album experiments with strange organic sounds, sprawling dark ambiance, and playful Swedish synth pop.
The Knife is known for gender bending (lowering the pitch of Karin’s voice, for example); but Shaking the Habitual is lyrically their most politically charged album exploring issues of gender identity, patriarchy, and ailments of Western culture.
Tom Hawking states in his article “Shaking the Habitual and The Knife’s Radically Intersectional Feminism“:
Still, for all that the fluidity of gender has been a prominent theme in The Knife’s work, it’s never been quite as central to the identity of an album as it is with Shaking the Habitual. Lead single “Full of Fire” set the tone, with its Salt-N-Pepa-paraphrasing outro: “Let’s talk about gender baby/ Let’s talk about you and me.” As they’ve said in plenty of interviews they’ve done around the release of Shaking the Habitual, they’ve been mainlining feminist theory in the long years since Silent Shout, and the influence of their reading list manifests itself throughout the album.
Speaking of The Knife’s reading list, Tom Hawking also wrote an article illuminating some of the feminist and post-colonial theorists that inspired Shaking the Habitual that’s worth checking out.
