Released: 2002
Art and commerce are frequently strange bedfellows and more often than not, any marriage is one of convenience. When The Knife’s single Heartbeats was covered by fellow Swede José González, the brother and sister duo of Olof Dreijer and Karin Dreijer-Andersson were phlegmatic, the latter commenting at the time “He plays it very carefully and humanistically.”
The gentle reworking took on legs however when is was selected to accompany a TV ad in which thousands of multi coloured balls were digitally let loose down the hill of a San Francisco street. Suddenly, a group which had been largely a domestic concern were on the brink of a mainstream which they’d sought mostly to avoid.
Stereotypes however were not for them. Raised in a house where heretically ABBA were banned for being too popular, the siblings’ twisted electronica made wilfully androgynous shapes, to the extent that Heartbeats sounded like it had escaped into the pop world by accident. It’s austere disco would be famously used later as a template by the likes of Robyn, but the duo avoided any such limelight; for them, success was having enough money to go straight back underground.
The Voice Of Unreason 