Young Knives are back with a new EP, Oh Happiness, due in June, ahead of an album Sick Octave, to follow in August. We’ve got a first listen to ‘Reproduction’ from the EP, which you can download for free below:
While the band came to the light in the mid-2000s post-punk revival, they’ve since made something of a sea change shift, as ‘Reproduction’ shows. The punk-disco elements are buried in there, prevalent in the spiky, kinetic riffing that emerges halfway through the cut, but this is only part of the whole. It’s driven by repetition of the abrasive, overloaded synths, powering with a computer game-like freneticism, which pulsate throughout, built on by Kraftwerk-esque vocoders and chanted voices, eventually becoming a torrent of digital distortion.
The change in tone may be down to adopting a wholesale DIY approach – says singer and guitarist Henry Dartnall: “For some reason when you are working with record labels it’s an assumption that you book into a £500 per day studio and a producer tells you what is wrong with your music and makes it better for you. I know it’s a cliché but after these sessions we have always felt there was no good reason why we couldn’t have done it ourselves like we always used to do. Expensive microphones do sound nice but they don’t make music more exciting, that’s all down to the people making it so we bought an old desk off eBay and a few mics and started recording. It’s so much more fun and you can hear it in the tracks."
Thomas ‘The House Of Lords’ Dartnall adds: “These tracks are completely and genuinely DIY and as such we hope that they are spontaneous and exciting. We wanted to make something dark and nasty, something industrial, synthetic, crass but with a sprinkling of pretty shit.”
The band are using Kickstarter to help fund the album – head over to their page here, where 12" picture discs and their own Sick Octave synths – “we’ve always been into stuff that makes interesting noises and we thought it would be cool to make a fun sound machine which we could use on the record and then give our fans a chance to buy them”, says the House Of Lords – are among the rewards for pledgers.
