THE KNIFE - Shaking The Habitual

Seven years after the increasingly influential Silent Shout, The Knife return with nearly 100 minutes of serious play, as even the hookiest tracks here get their parameters totally tweaked and toyed with, stretching out song lengths and upending expectations. To paraphrase the pair, without them electronic pop in 2013 would be a lot more boring!

(The single-disc edition omits "Old Dreams Waiting To Be Realized," a wispy twenty-minute Eliane Radigue-like boiler-room feedback drone, as well as the lyric sheet/comic strip posters found in the 2CD set.)

"Against all odds, Shaking The Habitual is the best work Karin Dreijer Anderssen and her brother Olaf have ever done and a candidate for 2013's best album, period. Think of Public Image Ltd.'s Second Edition, John Lydon’s (and Jah Wobble’s) famously abrasive masterpiece, with coherent politics and forward motion in the grooves. Hell, forward motion in the drones. Think of if Liars’ percussion monsoon Drum’s Not Dead was all it was cracked up to be. Think of last year’s Swans album, The Seer, if it was composed and programmed protests rather than improv goth comedy." - Paste

"With their last album, 2010's Tomorrow, In A Year—an opera about Darwin's Origin of the Species, recorded with Mt. Sims and Planningtorock—The Knife demonstrated their desire to think big; unfortunately, they also fell into the trap of thinking that ambitious, 'difficult' music shouldn't be very fun to listen to. So it's a huge relief to see them diving back into the seas of jouissance with Habitual. From the very first flicker of cymbals and finger snaps that opens the album, they tap into an electroacoustic universe whose glassy, metallic timbres ripple across the flesh, and whose rubbery tones undulate deep in the gut. They've never sounded more in tune with the materiality of sound or the sonorousness of the physical world." - SPIN