Shaking the Habitual

Background

On 18 April 2011, it was announced that The Knife was recording a new album, initially set to be released in 2012, through a post on the duo's website about the housing rights of Romani people in Rome. Shaking the Habitual was officially announced on 12 December 2012, along with a teaser video posted on YouTube. The album was recorded in Stockholm and Berlin from 2010 to 2012.

In October 2012, Shannon Funchess of Brooklyn-based electronic music duo Light Asylum revealed in interviews with Dazed & Confused and music blog No Conclusion that she would contribute vocals to a track on the album, with lyrics written by visual artist Emily Roysdon.

For the artwork of Shaking the Habitual, the duo commissioned Malmö-based illustrator Liv Strömquist to design a comic book titled "End Extreme Wealth" that turns the right wing's discourse against the poor on its head, depicting the 1% as a culturally-impoverished and vermin-like "other". "It came out of the idea, 'How do we use the area of the record cover in the best political way?'" Olof Dreijer said. "It's about bringing focus to extreme wealth rather than poverty being the problem of the world."

Themes and influences

Shaking the Habitual takes its title from a quote by French philosopher Michel Foucault. The album is inspired by the duo's readings in feminist and queer theory, while discussing environmentalism and structuralism. Olof attended a course in gender studies at Stockholm University and shared his reading list with Karin Dreijer Andersson. On 9 April 2013, The Knife released a Marit Östberg-directed video titled "Shaking the Habitual – The Interview", explaining the process of making the album. They state, "What we do is political. That should be impossible to misunderstand." They criticise the institution of the royal family and the nuclear family calling it "an institution that conserves inequality, injustice and exclusion", while advocating for living "in solidarity beyond nuclear families, nations and economical unions." In an interview with Pitchfork Media, Karin suggested that "people would be happier sharing things and being much more of a collective rather than working from these neo-liberal ideas of just looking after yourself."

The duo also criticise the "commercial homogenisation" of the music industry, saying it constitutes an "extremely hierarchical structure". In an interview with The Guardian, Karin mentioned how music artists are "getting even more commercial because they are selling their music to advertisements and going on tours with big alcohol brands", and questioned "how music and art can continue to develop or challenge itself within these new, very commercial frames." She also spoke of authenticity and quoted philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler, who says, "We are always in drag".

The video for "Full of Fire", among other things, questions a policy in Sweden that offers tax deductions for wealthy families who employ maids. The line "I'm telling you stories, trust me" in the song "A Tooth for an Eye" is borrowed from Karin's favourite Jeanette Winterson book, The Passion (1987). The interludes "Crake" and "Oryx" are named after characters in Margaret Atwood's 2003 dystopian novel Oryx and Crake. "Old Dreams Waiting to Be Realized" takes its title from an article written by Nina Björk for Swedish magazine Glänta.

Critical reception

Shaking the Habitual received widespread critical acclaim from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted mean rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 85, based on 43 reviews, which indicates "universal acclaim". Robert Christgau of MSN Music praised the album as "an exciting, multivalent Dreijer sibling showcase". Uncut's Rob Young wrote that Karin "possesses one of the most distinctive Scandinavian voices since Björk", referring to the duo's songs as "genetic pop mutations, scampering out of control". Lindsay Zoladz of Pitchfork Media hailed Shaking the Habitual as the duo's "most political, ambitious, accomplished album, but in a strange way it also feels like its most personal". Philip Sherburne of Spin remarked that The Knife have "never sounded more in tune with the materiality of sound or the sonorousness of the physical world." AllMusic's Heather Phares opined that "Shaking the Habitual isn't as cohesive or accessible as Silent Shout, and after experiencing the whole thing, fans may not return to it often, but it's hard to deny that it's an often stunning work of art", dubbing the album "a testament to the Knife's skill that they make such formidable sounds so compelling for so long".

Fact noted that "[f]ans of Silent Shout and Deep Cuts [...] will find Shaking the Habitual's hybrid of post-punk, techno, industrial, coldwave, drone and electro-pop discomfitting", adding, "At Shaking the Habitual's core are the processes of deconstruction and reconstruction, so rare in the tradition of mostly reiterative pop music that the album feels transgressive". The Independent critic Simon Price described the album as "long [...], strange, disturbing, uncomfortable, challenging. But it never fails to fascinate." Louis Pattison of the NME expressed, "Sporadically brilliant, perhaps it is The Knife's Inland Empire—a fearless piece of work with its own logic, one that shears away all safety nets. Invention, stark and undiluted." Anna Wilson of Clash concluded, "Increasingly aggressive and overtly detuned, [Karin and Olof's] individual styles have collided to create something elemental, immense and unsettling. Self-possessed and uncompromising, this is a record with regal bearing." Rolling Stone's Jon Dolan wrote that, compared to Silent Shout, Shaking the Habitual "explores even wilder styles of mordantly nutso android bleat". Eric Henderson of Slant Magazine viewed that most of the album "consign[s] anything remotely hooky into the realm of affectation", and the lyrics are "delivered by some of Karin's most obtuse vocal performances to date, her sinewy androgynous pipes muscling through slide-whistle octaves fearlessly and tunelessly." Hayden Woolley of Drowned in Sound found the album "unnavigable and unknowable, almost impossible to write about and even harder to listen to." The Guardian's Alexis Petridis felt that "Shaking the Habitual's problem is that the Knife seem to have dismissed the idea of making your point concisely as merely another affectation of a decadent and corrupt society", describing the album as "alternately utterly gripping and unbearably boring; incredibly bold and strangely flaccid, viscerally thrilling and hopelessly over-thought."

Accolades

In March 2014, Shaking the Habitual won the Nordic Music Prize.

Track listing

All tracks written by The Knife, except where noted.

Personnel

Credits adapted from the liner notes of Shaking the Habitual.