Young Knives

Track	Album / EP
Dialling Darling	Voices Of Animals And Men
Loughborough Suicide	Voices Of Animals And Men
Counters	Superabundance
Turn Tail	Superabundance
Glasshouse	Ornaments From The Silver Arcade
Reproduction	Oh Happiness EP
Green Island Red Raw	Sick Octave
Barbarians	Barbarians
What I Saw	Barbarians
Ugly House	Landfill

l-r: Thomas Dartnall, Oliver Askew, Henry Dartnall – photo John Spinks
(from the debut album cd insert 2006)

“Thinking about how crap that band The Young Knives were. They should have been amazing as it was a band of multiple Marks from Peep Show.” – Peaches Geldof, 2011

“Tweed geek rockers. But I think people will eventually see past it. It is your job to be better than that. It’s not your job to complain about it – that’s because you haven’t done anything more interesting than, yes, wear tweed. That’s why I keep going at it! We can write better music than the tweed-wearing story.” – Henry Dartnall, 2013

In the summer of 2006, while Britain was busy sweating to Shakira and chasing cars with Snow Patrol, a band called The Young Knives released their debut album, Voices Of Animals And Men. This was a time when guitar bands could still become bona fide pop stars – Arctic Monkeys, The Kooks, The Fratellis and Razorlight each scored multiple top ten hits that year – but it’s easy to see why it never happened for The Young Knives, who had about as much in common with Johnny Borrell as they had with, well, Shakira. Amid a sea of scruffy lads in skinny jeans, these three chaps in their Oxfam-shop officewear came across as something of an oddity. Their music videos got a bit of play on MTV2, and that first album was shortlisted for the 2007 Mercury Prize, but that was about it. Chart domination beckoned not.

Which isn’t to say that The Young Knives failed to leave an impression. If you’re a fellow veteran of the mid-noughties indie rock trenches, you probably remember that group who looked like accountants and sounded like Gang of Four if they’d spent less time at political rallies and more time on the sofa watching Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em. Perhaps you remember that song about the guy punching his girlfriend’s dad, or the other song that went ‘hot summer, what a bummer’. You might recall that their bassist was called House of Lords for some reason. Or maybe you just remember them as the band who wore tweed when everyone else was wearing Topman.

All of this added up to an image that would prove somewhat difficult to shake. The music was frequently overshadowed by how they dressed and how they spoke. The simple fact of their being three middle-class Englishmen (and of their making no attempt to disguise this) somehow became the band’s gimmick, and people just couldn’t see past it. Coverage of The Young Knives invariably namechecked Mark Corrigan from Peep Show, and of course the tweed jackets always got a mention too. Did you know that the town they come from is called Ashby-de-la-Zouch? Did you know that their album cover features a Whittlesea straw bear? Did you know that they shot a music video with a troupe of Morris dancers? How very eccentric! How very English!

This perception of the band as some sort of village fête novelty act could well have poisoned their long-term prospects, but as I write this in the spring of 2025, Young Knives – they dropped the definite article years ago – are still very much a going concern. They released their sixth album in January, and you can catch them on tour this autumn, although you might not recognise them as the same band you saw at the NME Awards Show (sponsored by Shockwaves Hair Care) back in ‘07. Since those days, they’ve taken one bold stride after another, and slowly but surely, they have achieved total reinvention. The Dartnall brothers are now a DIY rock institution with an enthusiastic fanbase, and the stuff they’re putting out these days is genuinely great: challenging, thrilling, and seemingly nothing like the music that brought them modest success in the mid noughties. The tweed suits and the Mark Corrigan comparisons are long gone.

And yet, while they clearly harbour some less-than-warm feelings about the glory days of landfill indie, they haven’t disowned their old music. Songs from Voices still show up on the band’s setlists, and crucially, they’re still trading under the Young Knives name. They admitted in a 2020 interview that they had gone back and forth on that last point: “It has a bit of baggage with it and we have thought, should we just sack it off? But then we thought, let’s just make the name into something different; let’s make the concept of Young Knives something that people like and battle with the demons involved with that.”

Here are my top ten Young Knives tracks:

1. Dialling Darling (Voices Of Animals And Men, 2006)

A quick bit of history before we go any further: at some point in the mid nineties, a group of kids from Leicestershire formed a band and called it Simple Pastoral Existence. Around the turn of the millennium, they changed their name to Pony Club and moved to the big city – Oxford – for a shot at superstardom. Some time after that, they learned of another band called Pony Club and changed their name again. They were now The Young Knives, consisting of Henry Dartnall on guitar, Henry’s brother Tom (a.k.a. House of Lords) on bass, and Oliver Askew on drums, with vocal duties shared between Henry and House.

(I should probably try to explain the House of Lords thing, shouldn’t I? Like Heath Ledger’s Joker talking about his scars, Henry gives a different explanation for the nickname every time an interviewer brings it up, but I think it originally came from Tom’s tendency to veto all of the band’s best ideas.)

In 2004 the trio released a mini-album called The Young Knives … Are Dead, which is worth a listen but probably not the best entry point for newcomers. After that, the band played a bunch of gigs, signed with Transgressive Records, and went into the studio with Gang of Four’s Andy Gill to record their first album proper.

That album was Voices Of Animals And Men, and though it saddled the band with a cartoonish tea-and-crumpets identity that quickly began to chafe, I still reckon it’s a really good set of songs. Dialling Darling was never released as a single, but for my money, it’s the best of the lot – perhaps the quintessential early Young Knives track. (I seem to recall that the song’s opening line, ‘Got to feed the human nature’, was printed on the front of their bass drum back in the day.) Henry and House’s duelling vocal lines are fantastic, and it’s got a nice cathartic ending to shout along with: ‘It’s a scam and it’s run by a man with a gun, and you know that he’s never gonna let you have fun!’

2. Loughborough Suicide (Voices Of Animals And Men, 2006)

On the face of it, The Young Knives were kind of a silly band. They sang in silly falsetto voices. Their B-sides had titles like The Worcestershire Madman and Murder The Otter. They had a song that went ‘I’m the Prince of Wales! I’m the Prince of Wales!’. And of course there was all the other stuff I’ve already mentioned: the pointedly untrendy clothes, the Morris dancers. House of Lords. Surely this wasn’t a band you were expected to take seriously?

The thing is, there was also a lot of darkness. The songs that make up Voices Of Animals And Men are all about boredom, disappointment, failure, the pointlessness of our humdrum existence. ‘Hanging on in quiet desperation’ as Pink Floyd once put it. Even that daft ‘hot summer’ song, which seems totally airheaded on first listen, is actually kind of depressing; it’s about hoping you get really sick so that you don’t have to go to work. ‘You live for the evening ’cause it’s the best part of the day, and hold out for weekends and bleak days of illness and pain.’

However, it’s important to understand that the silliness wasn’t just a facade; it was a crucial part of the recipe. Yes, they were singing about some pretty heavy stuff, but they were still a deeply goofy band, and everything they did was imbued with a very British sense of humour. In this country, misery is comedy – many beloved BBC sitcoms are a good deal grimmer than your average American TV drama – and The Young Knives were the very manifestation of that. You couldn’t separate their darkness from their daftness.

The absolute best example of this is Loughborough Suicide, the penultimate track on the Voices album. We Brits love complaining about our crap towns almost as much as we love watching really bleak TV comedies, so here’s a song that uses the market town of Loughborough to symbolise the realisation that life has nothing more to offer you. It’s a song of defeat, of self-disgust, of longing for a richer existence but knowing in your heart that you will never reach for it. ‘And I will never go down fighting …’

These themes would be revisited with more gravitas on the second Young Knives album, but here, the desperation and despair mainly come across as a joke at Loughborough’s expense. I completely believe that the narrator of Loughborough Suicide is depressed to the point of wanting to die, but at the same time, I’m laughing at the ordinariness of it all. I mean, this guy is not exactly Inspector Javert throwing himself into the Seine as his world crashes down around him; he’s just some bloke from Leicestershire, and his idea of the good life is drinking Evian and bonking on a tennis court. It’s serious, but that doesn’t mean you’re not supposed to laugh.

3. Counters (Superabundance, 2008)

I’ve always taken the title of Loughborough Suicide at face value, but if you wanted to make the case that that song isn’t literally about suicide, I think you could do it. The lyrics are kind of ambiguous; is he genuinely planning to kill himself, or does ‘considering Loughborough suicide’ just mean that he’s thinking about leaving town and starting a new life elsewhere? There’s room for multiple interpretations.

The same cannot be said for Counters, a far more direct song about suicide from second album Superabundance. ‘I know you think that I am joking around – you’ve got that wrong,’ Henry yelps. And then suddenly he’s ‘sitting in the front seat, turning on the motor, sucking on the hosepipe …’

(On that note, here’s something I’ve just remembered: I went to a Young Knives gig the year after Superabundance came out, and not only were they singing this song about inhaling exhaust fumes, they were also selling a T-shirt whose design was based on that part specifically. It depicted a car with a length of hose trailing from the exhaust pipe around to the driver side window.)

I get the distinct impression that fame – NME fame rather than Rolling Stone fame, but fame nonetheless – did not agree with this band. Superabundance is an album about dissatisfaction, disillusionment and remorse, and when I listen to it, what I hear is a cry of anguish from a group who had achieved their goals only to find the rewards utterly hollow. There can be little doubt that Young Knives (they had shed their ‘The’ by this point) were in a pretty bad place when they made this record; lead single Terra Firma used the metaphor of a fake rabbit and a real snake to express that nothing nice is true and nothing true is nice, then second single Up All Night took aim at the mirthless scenesters who were now coming to Young Knives gigs and making them feel like misfits at their own shows. But if you’re looking for the clearest possible evidence of the band’s dire state of mind circa 2007/08, Counters must surely be Exhibit A. The line ‘it seems that everything’s gone wrong since you entered my life’ sounds like it’s addressed to every marker of success that had come their way up to that point, from their record deal to their Mercury Prize nomination.

Counters is still a rip-roaring track, mind. In fact, Superabundance as a whole is exceptionally good – probably my favourite Young Knives album, in the way that everything you encounter when you’re sixteen years old ends up being your favourite of that thing.

4. Turn Tail (Superabundance, 2008)

I don’t know whether the Dartnall brothers look back on the Superabundance era with any fondness. As discussed above, that album is definitely not the work of people who were loving life, so it wouldn’t surprise me at all if this particular chapter of their story is one they’d rather forget. Turn Tail, the third track off Superabundance to be released as a single, remains a fixture of the band’s setlists to this day, which suggests that they hold at least this one number in reasonably high esteem … but then again, perhaps they only play it out of a sense of obligation since it’s their most popular track on Spotify. Perhaps they’re singing it through gritted teeth.

Me, I love this song. It’s my number one Young Knives track, and one of my favourite songs of all time. It’s a defeatist anthem that, lyrically, is quite similar to some of the tracks from album number one; in particular, the chorus ‘I will turn tail and run’ is very reminiscent of ‘I will never go down fighting’ from Loughborough Suicide. But as much as I enjoy Voices Of Animals And Men, nothing on that album soars like Turn Tail does. The insistent, intertwining guitar riffs – assisted by a gorgeous string arrangement – strike a really deep emotional chord, beautifully evoking the drudgery of a lifetime of thankless work, yet also managing to be total ear candy. It’s a powerful and strangely rousing listen; giving up has seldom sounded so noble.

5. Glasshouse (Ornaments from the Silver Arcade, 2011)

Ornaments From The Silver Arcade is the forgotten middle child of Young Knives’ discography. It wasn’t as successful as the records that came before it; Ornaments peaked at #80 on the UK’s Official Albums Chart, whereas Voices Of Animals And Men and Superabundance had reached #21 and #28 respectively. Nor was it as nutty and experimental as the records that would follow it; when The Line of Best Fit reviewed Ornaments at the time of its release, they talked about the album as though it marked some sort of stylistic shift for the band, but that’s laughable in retrospect. This was still very much Young Knives Mark One.

I think most fans would agree that Ornaments is the band’s weakest effort to date. It’s the album I put on when I want to listen to a Young Knives album, but not any Young Knives album in particular. Certainly the Dartnalls themselves don’t much care for it; when they’re writing their setlists nowadays, none of the songs from Ornaments get a look-in, and in a 2013 interview with The Oxford Student, Henry called Sick Octave – that is, the album that followed this one – “what we should have done after Superabundance”. Ornaments was a misstep, then, the work of a band who were scraping the bottom of the old barrel and itching to roll out a new one.

That said, I would contend that Ornaments From The Silver Arcade has its moments. Human Again is a great single that wouldn’t have seemed out of place on Superabundance; Woman might be their most danceable song ever. And then there’s the closing track, Glasshouse, which sounds like a bubble about to burst. This song is the border that separates the old tweed-and-ties Young Knives from the free-spirited Young Knives we’ve got now. ‘I tried not to be here,’ they sing, ‘think to yourself, oh fuck it.’

The name David Mitchell shows up in a lot of old articles about (The) Young Knives. Those articles of course refer to the comedian who played Mark Corrigan in Peep Show, but listening to Glasshouse, I’m reminded of the other David Mitchell – the author of books like Cloud Atlas and, more to the point, Ghostwritten. One of the many point-of-view characters in Ghostwritten is a British expat called Neal Brose who lives in Hong Kong and has a very stressful white-collar job. After the dissolution of his marriage and a major crisis at work, Neal has a total breakdown, throws away his pager and his briefcase, and heads for the hills.

That’s what Glasshouse sounds like to me: the breaking point. It’s the moment when the put-upon salaryman from Turn Tail finally throws up his hands, rips the tie off his neck, and sprints towards the wild horizon.

‘New fruits hanging plump in unknown trees – can’t you see?’

6. Reproduction (Oh Happiness, 2013)

I always get wrong-footed by the timeline at this point in the story. The way I tend to remember it, Ornaments From The Silver Arcade was followed by an extended hiatus while the band set about incinerating their tweed suits, severing all ties to the industry machine, building a home recording studio and reinventing themselves from the ground up. Six or seven years passed with no new music at all; then, finally, came the Oh Happiness EP, which sounded drastically different from Ornaments and signalled the arrival of Young Knives Mark Two, now completely independent and free to do whatever the hell they liked.

But that isn’t quite right. Here’s what actually happened: in April 2013, a mere two years after the release of Ornaments, Young Knives launched a Kickstarter campaign for a new album called Sick Octave. Their goal was to raise £10,000 to fund the creation of “a completely undiluted Young Knives record”; by the end of May, they’d hit that target and then some. (In total, the band received £12,135 from 413 backers, your forgetful correspondent among them.) Sick Octave came out in the autumn of 2013, but before that, we got the four-track Oh Happiness EP, which served as both a teaser for the album and an introduction to this bold new version of Oxfordshire’s tightest beat combo.

The EP opens with a song called Reproduction, and oh boy, this was something new all right. The track comes right at you with an aggressive, burping synth loop that sounds like the music you hear when you’re about to fight a boss in a video game, and from there it’s a swirling, nauseating descent into chaos. ‘Specimen A, I wanna marry you,’ Henry murmurs lustily. ‘I’m so messed up inside … won’t you be my valentine?’ It’s deliberately twisted and repulsive, and the message came across loud and clear: now that we’re beholden to none but ourselves, we’re going to make the queasiest, wrongest music you’ve ever heard. We’re about to make our last three LPs look like Westlife albums. We are committing, in a nutshell, commercial suicide. Won’t this be fun?

7. Green Island Red Raw (Sick Octave, 2013)

Sick Octave is easily the maddest Young Knives record. The stuff that came later isn’t exactly MOR, but like a newly-divorced man getting into sex clubs and cocaine abuse, this first hedonistic dive into rules-free DIY weirdness found the band giddy with liberation and gleefully pushing the boundaries just as far as they would budge.

Mind you, the transition from old Knives to new Knives didn’t happen all at once. Sick Octave wasn’t even the first album they released on their own label – that was actually Ornaments From The Silver Arcade. But as this Quietus piece explains, the band were still working with an outside producer for Ornaments, on top of which their manager kept sticking his oar in, and so their creative vision came out rather compromised on that occasion.

‘Compromise’ is not a word that gets anywhere near Sick Octave. This one was entirely self-produced, and as a result it sounds very different to the albums that came before it. Gang of Four’s angular guitar riffs had always been the most obvious influence on Young Knives’ music (indeed, the word ‘angular’ appears in old reviews almost as frequently as the words ‘tweed’ and ‘Corrigan’) but now those guitars were bobbing uneasily in a stew of home-made synths and found percussion, and Henry was talking up his love of acts like Suicide and Throbbing Gristle. The funny indie rockers who had once supported the Kaiser Chiefs were dead, or at the very least they were warped beyond all recognition.

Green Island Red Raw (a “pretend jazz track” per Henry) is definitely not the first song I would play for someone new to this band, but it’s a very good representation of where they were at this point in their progress. Pre-2013 Young Knives would never have made something this loose, this playful; there are several bits of this track that sound like mistakes, but one of the key lessons they had learned during the recording of Sick Octave was that a mistake can end up sounding even better than what you meant to play.

Embracing that philosophy was bound to rub some listeners the wrong way – Drowned in Sound’s review of Sick Octave, for instance, calls Green Island Red Raw one of the album’s low points – but I think the deliberately sloppy approach works rather well, especially in the context of this song’s lyrics. They’re vague and impressionistic, as are most of the lyrics on Sick Octave, but together with the faltering music they paint a vivid picture of someone who’s desperate to rest but determined to keep pushing forward. When I listen to Green Island Red Raw, I think of times when I felt tired, when my eyes were straining to stay open and my body was urging me to go to bed, but I struggled on because I had a deadline to meet or an appointment to keep. In situations like that, you know very well that you’re racking up a debt – that you’re going to feel very ill when you finally stop – but you can’t rest yet, so you resort to bargaining with your own fatigue. ‘Just let me get over this next horizon,’ pleads Henry as the drums skitter and the bass plonks about unsteadily. ‘Green island, green island, red raw.’ The song’s title might seem like word salad, but it always made sense to me: as long as he reaches his destination, his green island, it doesn’t matter how ragged he is by the time he gets there.

8. Barbarians (Barbarians, 2020)

After the dust had settled on Sick Octave, Young Knives more or less disappeared for the rest of the 2010s. They continued to perform live every now and then, and a new album was teased on Twitter in 2016, but we were still waiting for it by decade’s end. As mentioned above, I often misremember the timeline, and who could blame me? Any listener would guess that Ornaments From The Silver Arcade and Sick Octave were the two records that came out seven years apart, but in reality, that gap fell between Sick Octave and the band’s fifth LP.

Said LP finally saw the light of day in 2020, when the world was in the grip of the coronavirus pandemic. Barbarians was another uncompromising set of squelchy home-brewed bangers, but there were two key differences between it and Sick Octave. First of all, the trio was now a duo; long-time drummer Oliver Askew departed in 2015, and to this day, Henry and House of Lords remain the only two permanent members of the band. Secondly, Barbarians was not only written and recorded but also mixed and mastered by the Dartnall brothers themselves. Sick Octave had been sent off for professional mixing and mastering – that was actually where the lion’s share of the Kickstarter money went – so Barbarians was the first Young Knives album where the band had complete control over the final product.

Hence the seven-year wait. “It was finished by late 2017, but I just kept mixing it,” said Henry in another Quietus interview. “I had quite high expectations of my own record.” So did this insistence on perfection bear fruit? Yes indeed – noughties nostalgia forbids that I should call Barbarians my favourite Young Knives album, but I think I would make the case that it’s their best album.

And their bleakest. Barbarians was inspired by, among other texts, John Gray’s utterly depressing “Straw Dogs: Thoughts On Humans And Other Animals”. The Guardian review of that book dismissed it as “crankish”, “unbalanced” and “remorselessly, monotonously negative”; I recall flipping through a copy of “Straw Dogs” when I was in university, and I’m not inclined to challenge any of those criticisms. It’s probably the least life-affirming thing I’ve ever read. But hey, if it was the catalyst for the Barbarians album, perhaps there was some merit in it after all.

Gray’s book and the Young Knives record it inspired both posit that man is a uniquely violent creature and that we modern-day humans are really no more enlightened than we were in the days of Genghis Khan. We’re still fighting, torturing and murdering each other; we’re still raping Mother Nature to fulfil our selfish desires; and we’re still turning a blind eye to the suffering of our fellows. Remember when a Young Knives song went ‘hot summer, what a bummer’ or maybe ‘I’m the Prince of Wales’? Well, the title track from Barbarians has a bit that goes ‘put your money where your mouth is, let’s go for a hunt: ten for males, five for females, two for the runts’. It’s about the killing of Aboriginal Tasmanians by British settlers in the 1800s. Jolly stuff, eh?

You might think that these heavy themes would make Barbarians a real drag to listen to, but that’s not the case at all. It’s honestly quite a fun album, packed with chunky riffs and shoutalong choruses. It sounds BIG, and while the lyrics are often dark, they never come across as preachy or self-righteous. ‘I am barbarian,’ Henry barks on the title track. ‘I never lie about what I am.’ I wouldn’t go so far as to call this a celebration of human brutality, but it’s not really a condemnation either – just a reminder that there will always be a primal part of you that paints its face with the other tribe’s blood.

9. What I Saw (Barbarians, 2020)

The cover art for Barbarians shows a car tyre that has been left on the ground. The name of the band and the title of the album are scrawled on the tyre’s sidewall in capital letters. The earth on which the tyre rests has turned an unnatural rainbow colour, a bit like what you get when petrol leaks onto a wet road. The whole thing is a visual reference to necklacing, a rather horrific act of mob justice that involves forcing a petrol-soaked tyre over someone’s head and setting it on fire.

What I Saw, the album’s final track, imagines what it must be like for a child to witness something as disturbing as an execution by necklacing. Of the many nightmares contained within Barbarians, this one is probably the most vivid: it opens with a harsh squealing sound and a tense, menacing drum beat that sounds like the prelude to a beheading. Henry’s lyrics are vague, like half-remembered horrors that nonetheless retain the power to haunt. ‘And all the brave, we slashed them good…can you lean forwards into the light?’

Then there’s the chorus, which is sung not by Henry or House of Lords but by a couple of female vocalists. I can only think of one other Young Knives track (Woman off Ornaments From The Silver Arcade) that features female backing vocals, so this part really sticks out. It’s the part where the nightmare comes alive; I hear the wordless chanting (‘o-way-o-why, o-way-o-why’) and I picture my ecstatic executioners dancing madly around me as the flames lick higher. Then the nonsensical vowel sounds morph into actual sentences (‘you are a lie, you are alive, I pay the fee, eye for an eye’) and that’s somehow even more terrifying.

And finally, right at the very end of the song – indeed, right at the very end of Barbarians – we get a bizarrely triumphant-sounding coda that’s probably my favourite moment on the whole album. ‘And the road can’t blame you for all that,’ sings Henry. ‘So many summers pass like wind through the walls; the clever ones will find!’ I have no idea what any of this means, but it feels wonderful, like your dad comforting you after you wake up from a bad dream.

10. Ugly House (Landfill, 2025)

Landfill, the sixth full-length Young Knives album, entered the world in early 2025. That title is an act of knowing self-deprecation (a bit like if Coldplay put out a record called Bedwetters) but also of reclamation and recontextualisation. Yes, it says, we’re one of the many bands who were briefly famous during the ‘landfill indie’ era, which wasn’t exactly a golden age of rock; and yes, both the music we made back then and the music we’re making now will ultimately end up discarded and forgotten in the great landfill of history. But is the same not true of all things?

Henry Dartnall, you see, has become a bit of a hippie in his middle age. He wears his hair long, rocks a full beard, and flogs tie-dye T-shirts on his band’s website. And instead of singing about humanity’s inherent violence like on Barbarians, he now prefers to sing about impermanence and the cosmos and what have you. For example, the first and second singles from Landfill are about how the self and the passage of time are totally just, like, illusions, man. Free your mind!

Both of those songs are actually really good, but my favourite part of Landfill is its second track, Ugly House. This one’s a proper rocker, with an irregular time signature and a rollicking riff that I can’t listen to without playing air drums. This one has its share of spiritual stuff too (hell, the last two and a half minutes of the track are given over to a spoken-word bit about inner peace and the power of the mind) but it also deals with something very real that happened to Henry during the making of the Landfill album.

Basically, he and his family were evicted from the house where he’d been living for the best part of twenty years, and where much of the band’s work was recorded. Obviously this was a massive blow, for sentimental as well as practical reasons, but Ugly House finds Henry resolving to let go of the past and to embrace the change that has been thrust upon him. ‘So evict us from the ugly house! Evict us from the ugly house!’

Listen to all six Young Knives albums in order, and you might well conclude that this band abruptly and entirely transformed from one thing into another at some point circa 2012. On the surface, those first three albums (Voices, Superabundance and Ornaments) appear to share no DNA at all with the subsequent three albums (Sick Octave, Barbarians and Landfill). But once you dig deeper, it becomes clear that the change was actually quite a gradual one. It’s fascinating to look back through Young Knives’ back catalogue and spot how each successive album took another step towards a purified artistic vision. It started with some of the more experimental tracks on Superabundance; then they released Ornaments From The Silver Arcade on their own label, recorded Sick Octave in their own studio, and finally assumed total control of the process in time for Barbarians.

Nowadays, Young Knives are a band at ease with their history but still eager to move forward. Others in their position might have chosen to disown the songs from 2006 since that’s not really who they are any more, but if you go to a Young Knives gig today, you’ve a good chance of hearing The Decision and She’s Attracted To in amongst the more recent stuff. They’ve found a way to fold the old ingredients into their new recipe, and even as they move further and further away from where they started, their overall body of work still makes sense as a whole. The tweed jackets are a distant memory at this point, but the essence of the band is as it ever was: they’ve still got that old darkness, they’re still bored with the material world, and they’re still labouring away in search of some deeper meaning. They still have a great sense of humour, and they still don’t take themselves too seriously, even when they’re singing about some pretty serious stuff. And they remain absolutely unpredictable: they weren’t doing the same thing as everyone else back in ‘06, and they’re certainly not doing the same thing as everyone else now.