Photo Credit: Guadalupe Barrera @lovepainremorse
Some records don’t try to comfort you. They meet you where you are, in the dark corners, in the places you’d rather avoid. chrome is a lullaby: re is one of those records. Her New Knife isn’t interested in polishing the edges or making things neat. They take what hurts, what confuses, what vibrates too loud to ignore, and they shape it into sound.
The first glimpse of the release comes with TAGABOW’s reimagining of “kittyriff.” It doesn’t sound like a remix. It sounds like someone breaking the song open and finding a whole other creature inside. Heavy drums drag it forward like a slow heartbeat. Edgar Atencio’s voice cuts through with a metallic edge, fragile and sharp at the same time. It’s a reminder that beauty doesn’t live only in softness. Sometimes it’s the jagged thing that makes you feel most alive.
That has always been the truth of this band. They lean into the unfamiliar. They are drawn to what is dissonant, unsettling, and strange. Their cover of Björk’s “Pagan Poetry” wasn’t reverent, it was transformative. The song’s delicate skin was ripped open so its bones could breathe. What emerged wasn’t a copy but a challenge: to let grief and love exist together, raw and messy, in the same breath.
Their live shows are built on that same energy. Crowded rooms, buzzing amps, sweat dripping down the walls, and still they don’t back away. Eleven sets in one week at SXSW. That isn’t ambition. It’s survival instinct. It’s the need to keep speaking even when your throat is torn.
On chrome is a lullaby: re, the remixes do more than extend the life of the songs. They bend them. They give them new weather systems. Angel Emoji, Grimace, Red Rakes, Sword II, and Silicone Valley each stretch the original material into different dimensions. Some colder, some stranger, some unrecognizable. All of them reveal how much room there is inside Her New Knife’s work for reinvention.
This is not an easy listen. It isn’t meant to be. It asks you to stay with discomfort, to see the beauty in distortion, to understand that the thing that unsettles you might also be the thing that saves you. That’s what makes chrome is a lullaby: re matter. It doesn’t just play in your ears. It lingers in your chest.
