Taken from their forthcoming album ‘Barbarians’, Young Knives – aka brothers Henry Dartnall and The House of Lords have released a new single, Society for Cutting Up Men. Named after Valerie Solanas’ feminist political pamphlet the SCUM Manifesto. Henry explains:
“I really just wanted to write a song from this position. The basic idea is that women should rise up and the man is obsolete. It sounds extreme but when I read it she is so spot on about how men work and how we have deemed certain things to represent “success” and “power”, but really it can be argued that it’s all a myth and we are free to change this if we really wanted to. So it’s an imagined female uprising where it’s not about a peaceful march, or using the traditional “male” routes to law changes etc., it’s about violently and passionately removing men from the picture. The Society for Cutting Up Men will rise to the top.”
Dark and angular, but with a touch of funk in them there guitars, ‘Society for Cutting Up Men’ grabs you and pins you down, it’s eerie accompaniment and almost chanted lyrics giving it this almost unearthly feel, added to by this skittish and freakish guitar solo. It’s both hypnotic and brilliant.
It’s also accompanied by a video that Henry describes thus:
“We approached the video for ‘Society for Cutting Up Men’ with absolutely no plan. The only idea was that we would go shopping because there was a new shopping centre in Oxford and shopping centres are one of the many “towers” that the song possibly refers too: towers of power built by the “patriarchy”, or at least male dominated big business. Secretly we just wanted to see what it was like; filled with expectation and eager for the massive dopamine hits that a new retail experience promises. Other than that, the idea was just to capture those couple of hours inside this palace of the senses and see what came out. The f*****g jumpers were £30 each! We tried to get one in Primark but it was so close to Christmas that they were sold out. But the drug was already in our blood and we had to do it, we needed that look. £60 quid later and the video had its beautiful centrepiece. Considering that Primark was sold out, we were the only people actually wearing a Christmas jumper, which seemed counter intuitive. So when better to release a Christmas video than mid-summer, so we can peer into that alien other world of retail madness.”
Check it out, here
