Deep Cuts

The Knife earned a Swedish Grammy nod for this, its second record, as well as a nomination for Best Pop Group (which it won), but the trailblazing duo boycotted and declined the awards. (This would be repeated on future occasions.) The often-masked brother-and-sister duo rarely perform live or speak to the media. While it seems their music should be impenetrable and complex, it’s actually fairly accessible and structurally clean and spare (we can’t say "simple"). It does have a cerebral, cinematic quality, and it's endlessly unique: The Knife melds shimmering triangles, toy piano, steel drums, rattling snares, and African kalimba with synths that creep and glide and glisten. Effects-laden monster-movie vocals bump up against twee, airy choruses and ‘80s dance floor beats. The mesmerizing “Heartbeats” was a successful single that helped propel the duo to a larger U.S. audience. From beginning to end, Deep Cuts plays like a small epic, a beguiling and occasionally disquieting collection of songs that could each be described as transformative, mini-epics themselves.