Lykke Li Says What You Already Know to Be True: This Life is a “Knife in the Heart”

Although it would have been enough for Lykke Li to only release “Lucky Again” as a single before the release of The Afterparty in May, the chanteuse/walking performance artist is clearly (and rightly) excited about continuing to mete out some of the songs from the nine-track album. And the latest she’s seen fit to share is “Knife in the Heart.” Or, what might be better referred to as: the theme song of the decade. Just one perpetual stabbing right through the heart (so maybe that’s why Li captioned one of her announcement posts about the song with, “IS THIS THE SOUNDTRACK OF YOUR LIFE???????????????”) Between the Supreme Court repealing Roe v. Wade and the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the unchecked genocide of Palestinians—all amidst the backdrop of a certain Orange Entity in the U.S. getting reelected despite being a criminal on manifold levels—the stabs keep coming. With the latest being the fallout from the Orange Entity’s tinkerings, to put it mildly, in the Middle East.

So yes, Li probably couldn’t have chosen a more apropos moment to release this song. And, like “Lucky Again,” it’s a track that relies on bittersweet string arrangements to heighten the already present sense of melancholia around it. Co-written with Rick Nowels (who has worked with everyone from Madonna to Lana Del Rey), the mid-tempo anthem delivers a slow-burn instrumental intro before Li offers her advice at the twenty-two-second mark, instructing her listener, “You can take/Yeah, take what you need, what you need/Nothing will last, go ahead.”

Of course, many might interpret this in that “pillaging capitalist” sort of way, when what Li ultimately means is taking something emotional from her—taxing her in that way—with the knowledge that the pain that it might bring can’t last forever. Because this too shall pass and all that rot. But what she also means is that she can be there to absorb another’s pain as they try to get through it. To let it pass.

So it is that Li continues, “You can break, you can spit, you can walk on me,” then adding, “I can taste/Your tears, your scars, your bitterness/All you lost, I can hold.” Her words of comfort are almost like she’s reaching her arms out through the lyrics and enveloping the listener in a giant bear hug (and then people wonder why parasocial relationships exist). In effect, it seems that Li very much wants her audience to know that she “gets it.” How fucking brutal the world is, not to mention existence itself.

Accordingly, in the weeks leading up to the release of this track, Li kept reposting the same video of a man being endlessly pelted by a wind that not only keeps throwing shit in his direction, but also keeps trying to push him backward. It really is the visual representation of how it feels to be a person alive in this decade. Hell, any decade really. Because, to be quite frank, one could find fault with “the scene” (political or otherwise) during every era. Though, to be fair, this one does feel particularly shite. Joyless. Utterly without luster.

So maybe that’s why Li wrote a little note to fans upon the song’s unleashing that said, “Dear friend, from my heart to your heart. ‘Knife in the Heart’ is finally out. The world is so fucked up but together we can try to fly to dance to get back up create beauty from pain rise from the ashes transform transmute please don’t let this world break you. Yours truly and always, LL.”

With such a kind and encouraging entreaty, it’s only right that, over the course of the song, the vocal and musical tone both become more triumphant—defiant even—as if Li is overcoming the proverbial struggle in real time. And by the end of it, she essentially posits that if one is keenly aware that “this life is a knife in the heart,” then maybe, just maybe, it really is as Lykke Li says and it “can’t hurt me, hurt me, hurt me, yeah.”

Then again, such a declaration is kind of tantamount to Bob (Sean Astin), with no clue how the Upside Down works, in “The Pollywog” episode of Stranger Things telling Will (Noah Schnapp)—while framing it through the story of his own nightmare tormentor—that the Mind Flayer can’t really hurt him, if he just warns him to “go away” and that doing so is “easy-peasy, right?”

Well, anyone who watched Stranger Things knows how that worked out by the end of the same episode. In short, believing that something “can’t hurt you” doesn’t always make it true. However, if one can accept that “this life is a knife in the heart,” it at least somewhat makes the pain and disappointment less, well, cutting.