Silent Shout is an astounding achievement, intriguing and bewildering, enigmatic and engaging, and never less than compelling. "One Hit" is a gothic sea shanty, "Still Light" an electro/a capella hymn. "Neverland" is a thumping dancefloor anthem with a punchy lyric (‘I’m dancing for dollars for a fancy man’). The twinkling starscapes of "Na Na Na" could be the work of a sci-fi Sigur Ros. The ghostly fairy tale atmospheres of "From Off To On" are utterly hypnotic, while the kinetic menace of "Forest Families" is frankly frightening. ‘They say we had a communist in the family, I had to wear a mask,’ sings Karin, to hair-raising effect.

Throughout, her voice is manipulated and transformed every which way, a cacophony of vocal styles evoking the myriad characters peopling these songs: solitary sailors, a hermaphrodite, a sickly person or two, male-bonding groups in crisis, TV addicts, a scared housewife and, The Knife say, ‘a biologically weighty citizen that desperately tries to get to know his body’.

Karin says it’s the ‘scared housewife’ who is singing "Na Na Na" but she’s unwilling – unable even – to provide too much more detail. In contrast to the overt political content of Deep Cuts, for Silent Shout she wanted to do something ‘more under the surface. It may take a little bit more time to see what we say. But I don’t know how to separate art and politics. You make art about what’s in your head. It’s difficult not to think about what’s happening around you.

‘I guess many songs are about looking for something to spend time, and to fill the body, to avoid loneliness and the physical functions or dysfunctions of the body. It's one step forward and one step back. And the Silent Shout title, it’s like when you dream and really want to scream something, nothing comes out. Or we are screaming but not telling you what we are screaming.’

She’s more forthright on the subject of "Marble House." One of the best songs on the album, it begins with the synthesised sound of castanets before evolving into techno-ballad in waltz time. ‘We wanted to do something between The Sabres Of Paradise’s Wilmot and the movie The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. And the lyrics may be performed by somebody who devotes herself to anything, just to have something to fill up her time.’ "We Share Our Mother’s Health" is a burbling electro groove, like Chicks On Speed managed by Malcolm McLaren. Karin views it as a ‘sick’ song, but also a counterweight to the more ‘serious’ "Marble House."

‘It’s a very hysterical and mainly a panicked kind of song,’ says Olof, who admits he often has no idea what his sister’s lyrics are about. ‘I can only relate to the harmonics. But the sounds are… like a new rubber material.’
The inventing of new sounds was another of the guiding precepts behind Silent Shout. ‘I learned a new synthesis, the FM synthesis, and we have featured that on every song,’ says Olof, acknowledging that his inner geek is really also his outer-self. ‘You can find that on the Yamaha DX7 and some others. But what I use is software for that – it can make very fragile and sensitive sounds that change during the period that you hear them. I started to use it because Plastikman uses it,’ he adds cheerfully.

‘It’s also a way to make sensitive sounds that are also very cold and physical also – that can feel physically like they go into your body through certain frequencies. That’s good too,’ says Olof with a chuckle. We wait for someone to make the obvious joke about The Knife’s music cutting deep into the listener. But no one does.

Silent Shout is more focused than Deep Cuts, and not just because it features 11 tracks where its predecessor had 17. The songs are rich with detail, thoughts and ideas and innovations piled hard on top of each other. It may not make you want to dress up as a crow in the snow. But its jaw-dropping fusion of technology and emotion, circuitry and the soul, melodrama and melody, will leave you gasping.

- Craig McLean, January 2006