Oxford indie band Young Knives will return later this year with new album ‘Landfill’.
The band emerged from the city’s indie scene, initially releasing through Shifty Disco before being snapped up by Transgressive. Earning a Mercury nomination for their album ‘Voices Of Animals And Men’, Young Knives are now focussed around Henry Dartnall and Thomas Bonsu-Dartnall.
New album ‘Landfill’ is their first in four years, and the self-aware title refers both to the decline and fall of indie, and their own wariness of being left behind.
As lead singer and guitarist Henry Dartnall puts it, “it’s a record is about letting things go before they are taken from you, including the carefully curated images of ourselves. Embracing everything the world throws at you and not taking it to heart.”
New single ‘Dissolution’ is out now, and it was penned against the backdrop of the band being evicted from their home, in the process packing away their long-time studio space. The task felt like “we were dismantling everything about our band and music.”
‘Dissolution’ kicks against the pricks – the lyrics were partly inspired by the Hitchiker’s Guide To The Galaxy quote “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”
Henry Dartnall expands:
I love ideas like this. What an amazing way to present such a deep idea but also make it fun. I just wanted to experiment with doing our version of that. You can’t force ideas on people, you can just suggest them and leave them hanging in a way that people might one day consider if they feel like it.
This song is kind of dumb. The words are about the dissolution of the ego or ego death; a thing that appears in eastern religions and was written about in Joseph Campbell’s A Hero’s Journey. It’s the refocusing of your attention on the part of you that never becomes yesterday and can never become tomorrow, or something like that. It’s very similar to what people report from psychedelic experiences too. The problem is that writing and performing rock music is very much rooted in the world of the ego, so the idea of my big ego mouth shouting words about ego death is ridiculous. But then I thought that contradiction was kind of fun too.
We recorded the song to an old tape machine as a throwaway experiment. The tape we used was from a car boot sale and all perished and dusty. The channels of the tape machine kept failing because they were all clogged up with tape oxide. It was a live take and we did it with our friend’s Silke and Max Blansjaar playing drums and piano. It was also recorded at the end of our time in the studio we have had since we started together, so we were in the middle of packing it down. It felt like we were dismantling everything about our band and music so it all made sense at the time and felt very apt.
Tune in now.
Photo Credit: Hannah Carter
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