Silent Shout

Sound DNA

• Electronic
• Synth-Pop / New Wave

• brittle
• eerie
• nocturnal

About

At once massively influential and totally inimitable, The Knife’s third studio album, <i>Silent Shout</i>, 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. <i>Silent Shout</i> 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 <i>Deep Cuts</i>. 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 was previously known for bouncy, slightly off-kilter melodies, <i>Silent Shout</i> 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 <i>Silent Shout</i>’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 <i>Silent Shout</i>, 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 <i>Silent Shout</i>’s framework to great effect, but none have come close to nailing the specific pop weirdness that The Knife achieves 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.

via Apple Music

Tracklist

Credits