The Knife emerge from hibernation with new album, Shaking the Habitual

The Knife are stirring. 

The Swedish brother-sister duo haven’t released an official studio album since 2006’s rapturously received Silent Shout, although there’s been plenty of activity in the intervening years: Karin Dreijer Andersson made a sizeable splash with 2009’s lavish Fever Ray LP, and the pair worked with fellow Scandinavians Mt. Sims and Planningtorock on the Charles Darwin-indebted opera Tomorrow, In A Year in 2010. On a somewhat more low-key tip, Olof Dreijer has been surreptitiously turning out techno 12″s under the Oni Ayhun alias.

New material from the group has been expected for a little while: rumours about a new LP began to swirl last year, and Light Asylum’s Shannon Funchess claims to have helped out with the album earlier this year. As Dummy note, a short video has just been posted to The Knife’s website, kicking off speculation that new material is on the way. Update: Pitchfork have since reported that there will be a new Knife album released through Mute this Spring, titled Shaking the Habitual. There are no other details at this point.

Over an ambient soundtrack, the clip shows a lady dolled up to the nines on a child’s swing, and then segues into some brief shots of revellers at a club. The clip was also posted onto Facebook with the following blurb: “Music can be so meaningless. We had to find lust. We asked our friends and lovers to help us”.

The siblings Dreijer love an oblique stunt – just watch this acceptance speech, for Christ’s sake – so this could well be a red herring being flung out onto the web. Still, fingers crossed. The male half of the pair recently curated the CURIOUS mini-festival in Sweden.