Yr Knives - Begin Yr Singing (2026) [Hi-Res]

Chicago composer and arranger Paul Karner wanted two very different guitarists together on a recording of his music: the jazz-trained Andrew Trim (raised in Nagano, now based in Milwaukee, leader of Hanami and Retroreflector) and Brian J Sulpizio, the force behind Health&Beauty, who usually engineered Trim’s other projects. Friends and collaborators, they had never played guitar together as equals; they learned their parts separately, but when they sat down in one room shortly after the pandemic, it became clear a band was forming. That band became the quartet Yr Knives, joined by bassist Douglas McCombs (co-founder of Tortoise, member of Eleventh Dream Day) and drummer Quin Kirchner, one of Chicago’s most in-demand players in jazz and rock. For Sulpizio, the band was also a refusal of the music world’s hasty return to “normal” after the pandemic.

From 2022, Trim and Sulpizio wrote material as a duo, then brought in the rhythm section. Riffs each had carried for years found their missing melodies the moment the other heard them. The core of the sound is two overdriven guitars merging into something neither could produce alone, over a rhythm section that can lock a groove or let it drift. The music is exploratory, “searching,” and doesn’t always supply answers. Touchstones: Sonny Sharrock, Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Albert Ayler, Erik Satie, Television.

The debut album Begin Yr Singing was recorded over a few days at the now-closed Chicago studio Palisade (engineer Nick Broste), with the whole band tracking live in one room, lined up in a row through six amps, from full takes with minimal editing; “Fear&Trimbling” is a single take. Sulpizio and Cooper Crain mixed it. Karner wrote the string arrangement for “Fear&Trimbling” (performed by Rachel Brown and Erin Rafferty), and Trim’s Hanami bandmates Jason Stein and Mai Sugimoto improvised horns on the closer “White Gladys” (a title supplied by McCombs’s wife, Kiki Yablon). The six tracks show their collaborative wiring: “Trimnopedie” grew from a sketch with a hint of Satie, “Double A (Start Yr Singing)” is harmonized across both guitars and dedicated to Albert Ayler, and McCombs found the melody for “These Chords.” For Sulpizio, used to sole responsibility for the mood of a Health&Beauty record, Yr Knives sounds brighter and less singular, steered by four people at once. The band has already toured with The Messthetics, and live, the same songs never arrive the same way twice.

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