Feel The Ice White Heat

Kate Boy “Northern Lights”

Kate Boy sounds a little like if The Knife had decided to chase pop stardom after Deep Cuts instead of, y’know, going full goth, exploring avant garde opera, and creating abrasive electronic agitprop. This isn’t a bad thing – as much as I love and admire what The Knife became, there’s always that part of me that wishes they would’ve made some more pop music because they were so good at it, and so far ahead of the curve. (Seriously, people are catching up with where they were in 2003 in 2015.) “Northern Lights” is superficially quite a lot like The Knife in terms of rhythm and tonality, but the song itself feels more common. This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily – Kate Akhurst has a good sense of melody and drama, and it’s interesting to hear a more conventional piece of music get a Knife-like makeover. It’s a spikier, more aggressive sound, and that icy vibe always has a way of disrupting any sense of traditional binary sexuality. Twelve years late, and it still sounds like the future.

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