Yr Knives, started out as a vision of Chicago composer and arranger Paul Karner, he had an idea he couldn’t shake: he wanted two very different guitar voices, playing parts that seemed unrelated on paper, brought together on a recording of his own music. He asked Andrew Trim and Brian J Sulpizio. The two were already friends and collaborators, usually with Sulpizio engineering Trim’s other projects, but they’d never played guitar together as equals. They practiced their parts separately, neither quite hearing how the pieces would fit. Then they sat down in a room together, and Karner’s vision came into focus, along with a second realization: this was a band waiting to happen. That band’s debut album is Begin Yr Singing. The record drops on October 30th via Western Vinyl. Today, they share the first single “Fear&Trimbling.”

That first meeting happened just after the pandemic, a detail that matters to how the group thinks about itself. Sulpizio remembers being unsettled by how quickly the music world wanted to snap back to normal, as if nothing had happened. Yr Knives became, in part, a refusal of that, a reason not to simply pick up where things left off.

The four players who eventually formed the band are deeply embeded in the Chicagoo music scene. Trim is a jazz-trained guitarist who grew up in Nagano, Japan, now based in Milwaukee, who leads the groups Hanami and Retroreflector. Sulpizio is the constant behind Health&Beauty, a shapeshifting, seven-albums-deep project that has long doubled as an incubator for the city’s talent. Anchoring them are bassist Douglas McCombs, a founding member of Tortoise and a fixture of Eleventh Dream Day, and drummer Quin Kirchner, one of Chicago’s most sought-after players in both jazz and rock circles, whose 2020 LP The Shadows and the Light drew an 8.0 from Pitchfork. As Sulpizio frames the chemistry: two of them come up as rock and roll players, two as jazz players, and the music lives in how closely they listen across those languages.

Yr Knives
Begin Yr Singing
Western Vinyl
Traclisting

1. Stretch Bath
2. Trimnopedie
3. Fear&Trimbling
4. Double A (Start Yr Singing)
5. These Chords
6. White Gladys

Pre-order Begin Yr Singing Yr Knives HERE