Photo by Marcus Maddox

“I mean, the new stuff is not really shoegaze. It feels a lot more classic, a little more mature, and the music just has these comfortable places to sit in.” said Knifeplay guitarist Johnny Klein in a 2024 interview. “Since the songs are so long, there is a buildup that happens, and it happens at a comfortable pace, but it’s not overdriven.” The press really wanted to place he and the band into a corner or two of genres as buzz began to swirl around the Philly band’s 2022 breakthrough, Animal Drowning, but the multitudes were just too overpowering even a loud calm. They were an experimental rock band who had a desire to be boundless.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to few who have been following along with Knifeplay’s gradual evolution that “Love Song”, the lead single from the Philly band’s forthcoming album, What Is Truth?, is a reminder of that notion as well as everything Klein put the world on notice with the above. That definitely includes the song’s length, as at a touch over 10 minutes, the room for the band’s reverb-veiled frontman and guitarist Tj Strohmer to envelope you into a dramatic air assembling is vast, as if to sweep the mending romance between children of divorce, allusions to sad fathers, and stranger chaos into the same empty-hearted ritual of existence — all to be salved by a shattering meridian of intimacy. “I’ll put my arms around you / I feel how we’ve changed / But can we forgive too?,” he wonders. Though that question remains unanswered once the epic dissipates, certainty remains in Knifeplay’s steady progress in the art of the slow burn.

Directed by: Ben Turok

Knifeplay’s What Is Truth? will be released January 22nd on Double Double Whammy.