The Daily Spin II
The Knocks | HISTORY
Welcome back to the Daily Spin. For the uninitiated, this is the series in which I review an album every day of 2025.
As was the case two years ago, my favorite song from each album can be found at the playlist linked here.
Album: HISTORY (2022)
Artist: The Knocks
Link:
Two years ago, I took a look at 55, the Knocks’ first album. I touched on the feature-laden tracklist, the way that the sound bridged the past with the present, retrofuturistic in a deeply catchy sense, the kind of groovy electronica that perfect fit the sound of the world before it went off the rails.
I can’t really say they’ve done a lot differently here on 2022’s HISTORY - even to the point of bringing some of their collaborators back - Parson James and POWERS both stun on ‘River’ and ‘Stay Gold’, respectively.
The more I look at it, the more it appears to be a bit of a copy-and-paste situation, honestly. Phoebe Bridgers (which, lol, what) is swapped for MUNA, who shines on club banger ‘Bodies’, while Carly Rae Jepsen is given for Dragonette in the kind of swap that honestly had me convinced it was CRJ for a hot minute. Ah well.
The other real star is the track with Foster the People, ‘All About You’, which glows under the starlight, piano and choral influences coming together into a dance-infused jam session that feels like that joyful moment after the strife, where words are hardly necessary when movement can suffice. So incredibly danceable.
The album doesn’t always work - it’s never bad, hence the high rating, but the issue with 12 genres across 12 tracks is that when you veer too far from safety you’re bound to get caught out by the riptide.
Still - an album that lives up to its name, giving us a link between the past and the future, a sound as timeless as much as it is visionary. Pretty sick.
Rating: 8/10
Best Tracks: All About You, River, Stay Gold
Worst Tracks: Bang Bang