Knifing Around Issue An AI Warning On “Bodysnatchers”
Has the value of the human touch ever felt lower? In chasing digital solutions to eliminate tedious tasks and inefficiencies, we may have only accelerated our own obsolescence, and not just in an industrial sense. Our creativity itself feels under siege, at risk of being edged out as audiences gravitate toward digital constructs dressed up as the latest hit pop star on their favorite streaming platform or social feed. Even on a smaller scale, we move toward homogenized logos and flyers, all born from the uncanny valley, to draw our attention in day-to-day life, as this new normal settles in without our attention even being drawn.
But there are those sounding the alarm. Not just issuing rallying cries or setting plans in motion, but pulling back the curtain in real time, making the automation visible so we stay aware and alert. Ready to resist. Ready to reclaim some measure of control. Or at the very least, ready to stand behind the real art that still endures.
Richmond’s Knifing Around takes one of those stands on their new stark and striking song, “Bodysnatchers,” the lead single from their forthcoming record Vivisect, due out this May via Blank Verse Records. Trading the raucous dance-punk of their earlier work for a darker electronic palette, the band leans into tension and texture with a more deliberate hand, shaping a sound suited to the anxieties it sets out to confront. Less a reinvention than a calibration, the shift sharpens their lyrical precision, honing in on some of the most pressing trends of our time, specifically forces that are slipping past traditional socio-political frameworks as they reshape the world around us.
“Bodysnatchers” arrives at a time when the most unsettling threats aren’t mythic monsters or even humanity at its worst, but a creeping inhumanity of our own making that looms on the horizon. The song confronts this exact moment, where we see the boundary deliberately erased between human creation and synthetic output. “The track is a reflection on AI and culture,” frontman Owen Martin explained, “specifically the way that using AI separates people from getting to know themselves creatively. It also alienates them from the community found in authentically trying to develop a skill.”
“They are watching the way we move and listening to how we speak,” Martin warns in the song’s opening lines, immediately casting AI not as a tool, but as a creeping contagion, an invasive force driven by control rather than coexistence. Around him, a booming tone serves as a signal flare that should set off alarms in all our consciousness. In contrast, rhythmic tones skitter underneath, echoing the swarm of bots cataloging and copying every fragment of human output in real time.
The video, shot and edited by Knifing Around bassist Jack Wolfe, centers on a largely static shot of Martin as lights and hues dance around him, flashing with horror as it quietly builds a sense of creeping dread. Most unsettling is the shadow behind him. At first, it shifts subtly, but slowly grows more erratic, mimicking the unmistakable emergence of a digital double beginning to stir with sentience.
The song takes its sonic aim from dub textures and Nine Inch Nails-styled ambiance, marking a clear shift from the dance-punk that defined the band’s earlier work on 2022’s debut EP Don’t Stab Your Hand and 2024’s follow-up All Across The Nation. With the visual accompaniment, they still retain traces of the art rock that shaped those releases, though with an unbound sense that lets the music chase this digital contagion across its vast, unholy sprawl.
Per Blank Verse’s description of Vivisect, the new record continues this darker, more probing direction while still retaining the kinetic pull that defined the band’s earlier work. Described as their “most mature, dense, and darkly sinuous work to date,” it places Knifing Around at a point of convergence, where propulsion and paranoia move in lockstep, and the band’s heightened sense of purpose allows them to explore these distressing themes with greater depth.
Watch the video for “Bodysnatchers” above and stream the track now. Pre-orders for the vinyl edition of Vivisect are available ahead of its May 15 release, following a digital drop on May 5. For updates and more information, follow Knifing Around and Blank Verse Records on social media.
Vivesect Track Listing:
Side A:
“Believe”
“Go Alone”
“Does It Linger”
“Vivisect”
“The Colossal”
Side B:
“Bodysnatchers”
“Mind Bent”
“Broken Glass”
“I’ll Stick Beside You”
“Paralyzed”
