The Swedish duo fashioned an ideal, and a sonic landscape, in which many artists have found their own voices
"The first time I heard Silent Shout, it’s the day I decided to get a job in a call centre and save up for a laptop and learn how to produce."
Sydney-bred, now Los Angeles based DJ and producer Alison Wonderland attributes much of where she is today to Swedish duo The Knife and in particular, Karin Dreijer Andersson.
"I think she’s absolutely such an incredible woman… she's never compromised herself for anybody and everything she does is just about the art," Wonderland [aka Alexandra Sholler] told triple j.
"She’s not scared to push herself and I just think that’s absolutely amazing.
"Honestly that’s the biggest reason for me that I’m kind of here now."
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Sholler first heard the song 'Silent Shout' at a Sydney club and remembers feeling as though she was in a trance as she tried to find out who the artist was.
With its probing beat and icy shards of glassy sequenced sounds gathering a hypnotic momentum and filtered female and male vocals ghoulishly mumbling about growing old and loosing teeth in dreams, the title track to the duo's third record feels like a precariously struck balance between states of anxiety and pure exhilaration.
The processed vocals, a distinguishing element of The Knife's sound, are an indication of the gender blurring motivations that drive Dreijer Andersson and her brother Olof.
"The standards for being a woman or a man are very limiting, Karin explained to MTV Italia in 2006.
"So I think it’s very important in your work if you’re able, to try to broaden up things and open up the way you should look, how you can sing, how you can make music and perform.
"If you can do it in a way to broaden things up for different genders, [then] I think you have to."
"I think we think about that in every track," Olof added. "If a song feels too male or female, we have to have a contrast, to turn it into something genderless or more unisex."
In addition to the title track, those gender neutralising contrasts are born out in the darting cacophony of 'We Share Our Mother’s Health', a domestic bliss with a twist situation as told by 'One Hit''s cyborg narrator and in the creeping dread of 'From Off To On'.
"One of the ideas that I wanted to play with was to be a character that you can't place," Dreijer Andersson told The Fader in 2016.
"What happens when a listener can't place a vocal? What is it? Now, we’re much more open to not having to decide what gender a vocal belongs to."
Breaking down these gender boundaries also means having to address the power imbalance between the sexes.
Wobbly beats bob up against rigid moral and social mores in 'Forest Families', a defiant stomp marks a violent situation in 'Neverland' and 'Na Na Na' is a chilling depiction of a woman grappling with conflicting states of comfort, vulnerability and personal safety.
In press interviews and performances for Silent Shout, the duo presented themselves draped in long black capes and papier-mâché-hooked nose-masks covered their faces. They looked like dazed Halloween revellers lost on the way home from trick or treating.
It was, however, all part of their concerted efforts to remove their physical identities from the process of promoting their art and bring firmer focus to their music. And whilst it is dark and stark gothic electropop, it’s delivered with a knowing wink.
"They [the costumes] were very uncool, and I think that's really important because electronic music at the time was very serious," Olof told The Fader.
"And I think playfulness and humour has always been very important part of our work."
By contrasting and colliding ideas of gender, social conventions and conformity, by blurring the lines between the synthetic and the organic, the weird and the wonderful, this Swedish duo fashioned an ideal, and a sonic landscape, in which many artists have found their own voices.
It's hard to imagine artists like Grimes, Austra and CHVRCHES sounding as they do if it weren't for these Swedes.
But accolades and acclaim has never been a motivator for the pair. Instead, Karin Driejer Andersson summed it up with typical Scandinavian efficacy.
"For me, The Knife is anything and nothing," she told Dazed. "It can be whatever you want."