From the knife’s edge: Imogen and the Knife on the power of “last hurrah” artistry
Editor’s Note: For 2026, Far Out didn’t just want to recommend ones to watch; we wanted to stick with them. Selecting five artists set for greatness, spotlighting Pem, ELLiS-D, Jeanie and the White Boys, Camille Schmidt and Imogen and the Knife, our Class of 2026 spans genres and countries to back the best of the rising stars. In a series of repeat conversations pairing each act with a writer, we’ll be checking in with them throughout the year, tracking the highs, lows, trials and triumphs of the talent we believe in.
For this check-in, Lucy Harbron sat down with Imogen and the Knife as she readies herself to release new music.
Imogen and the Knife is an easy artist to connect with. As she and I both strained our north-east accents to pronounce “oat milk” in the way the London barista would understand, I knew that connection would be easy to find in conversation, too. Sometimes the best way to delve into the depths of an artist is just to chat, find a starting point, build a bond and wait for the story to emerge.
In the case of Imogen, it emerges instantly. “How come you decided to change artist names?” I asked as the one and only proper question. I’d been aware of her for a while under her earlier moniker, IMOGEN, as her track ‘Bloodbag’ was sent to me by a friend and left me staggered, but it was when I saw her perform under her new name that I truly fell in love.
Yet still, the new name is just the same woman. The first time I saw her live, Imogen was playing under the stained glass of a church, accompanied by an old organ, and the lyrics of ‘If It Won’t Talk of Rain’ moved me to tears. It felt so personal and so visceral, one of those perfect pieces of art that touched me but was clearly still so distinctly hers. So I wondered why the name change when it was still coming from the same Imogen?
The story revealed itself: “I don’t really know if I’m gonna make anything else again after this,” she said, recalling the mindset in which she made her EP, Some Kind of Love.
As she began crafting what would end up being her debut release under this new name, she was in a strange place, having parted from her manager, leaving her label, and retreating north for a while. All of that seemed to spell an ending, but then suddenly, she got some funding.
“The music industry always has been, but especially at the minute is so volatile. It’s in such a fragile state, especially for people who don’t have any money. It kind of is like, every time I’m able to make something, I don’t know if I’ll get this opportunity again,” she said, and although a grant had thrown her a life ring, the water was still too choppy to actually be able to see a way through. Despite the money, the project was made with the feeling that it might still be a last chance to do so.
And so, she decided to create from that place. “I’m just gonna go all out,” she said as the ethos, “treating it like a last party at the end of the world,” she elaborated, “I got my friend Alex to help me produce it, and then I got all of my friends to play on we recorded it at RAK, and it was just all guns blazing as a kind of last hurrah, or at least a ‘whatever happens next happens’ thing.” It was only after that, when sitting back and looking at the songs, that she realised she was truly proud of them and resolved to continue, but she wanted a fresh start.
The addition of the knife took on many meanings, like a “reclamation of the surgical knife” after a youth spent undergoing several operations, or the more poetic ideals of the “pen being a sword”. But really, Imogen felt like the name was given to her. “I just googled Imogen, just to see what came up. And one of the first things that came up was a beautiful portrait of Imogen from a Shakespeare play, Cymbeline, and it was an amazing painting of her holding a knife,” she explained. So, a spontaneous call was made, and Imogen and the Knife became “a kind of manifesto for everything”.
The story starts to merge into a pattern. Sipping our coffees, I throw it out there, “It works perfectly because that EP was kind of made on a knife’s edge too?” “Exactly,” she responds, and then it moves from there, suddenly flowing in a direction.
I bring up The Cure and how Robert Smith’s trick for getting great records was to tell the band before studio time began that it would be their last. Perhaps that’s the trick. Perhaps the way to make something great is to treat every single thing like the last thing.
But the kicker is that really, every artist does. “Throwing yourself off a cliff is literally this career,” Imogen says as we’re talking about how everything in art feels like a one-chance risk. The very reason why killing your darlings is so painful is that all artists feel like anything they cut or edit out dies there and then if it isn’t used. Imogen recalls how lately she realised that she hasn’t used certain chord sequences from her teenage years, in songs that have never even been recorded.
All art naturally seems to exist as a one-shot thing, and that’s arguably why Some Kind of Love feels so special, because it feels immediate and yet definitive as a release where Imogen not only leaves it all on the page, lyrically weaving between plain-speaking confession into rich poetry with the same heavy emotion, but she also commits musically. If she was going out, she was going all out.
Thankfully, she’s sticking around. Yet the mindset of that EP has lingered. In 2025, Imogen supported The Last Dinner Party on their tour, playing some of her biggest rooms yet. “The mindset was like, ‘I might never do this again’, and that’s actually such a special way to look at it,” she said as the one-time-only view kept her present, adding, “Every day I was so grateful”.
The same ethos runs through her other project. It pushed her to say yes when the band’s Lizzy Mayland asked her to produce their solo EP with Imogen, saying, “They asked, like, ‘Do you produce?’ And I was about to be like, ‘No’, when I obviously do, but I just had never really produced for somebody else. And I was such big fan of Liz, and I was a bit terrified, I think. But I kind of, like, took a beat and was like, ‘Actually, yeah’.” Together, they made The Slow Fire of Sleep, a gorgeous release.
It also runs through Thredd, her collaborative band with Max Winter and Will Lister, born out of another one-chance offer. The trio had shared a studio space for a long time before an offer landed on their desk: “This guy we’ve known for a while said to us, ‘There’s this residency at Lay Low. I think it would be great if, like, you three just went in and just, like, saw what happened’.”
They had to do three shows, and while they went in with no intention to become a band, the no-plan, no-pressure but all-risk approach made them one. “What ended up happening was kind of an exact amalgamation of all of our stuff. So you really hear us all in it, and the product is really fun and really exciting,” she said. Again, it led to something gorgeous, their debut, It’s Lovely, Come On In.
However, while Imogen is more than aware of the creative power of the knife’s edge, and while it might be where her artistry lives, it is not where she believes artists should. Thredd taught her that in a lot of ways, as she noted, “It’s a special one for me, because I’m still songwriting, but it’s like exercising a different muscle”. It’s a project that allows her to hone her craft, without it being quite so personal or revealing.
Imogen also learns more and more about that as she teaches, working as well as a songwriting lecturer. “Creativity can happen without breaking yourself in half,” she said as a key lesson she always makes sure to pass on, and reminds herself of. “While I think personal writing is really important, and I need that outlet, and I will always do it, it’s been so important to be like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m also a songwriter and a singer and a performer, and it doesn’t have to be so painful’.”
In 2025, there were no Imogen and the Knife releases. After throwing herself off the proverbial cliff for her debut EP the year before, last year was a busy year of rebuilding through those side projects and shows. “Another battle as an artist is turning the noise off of like as that fear is always there like oh, I’m gonna disappear, or no one’s gonna care, or whatever,” she said, but she’s been doing her best, adding, “Something that I’ve kept coming back to is if nobody gave a shit, would I still be writing songs? And the answer is yes.”
And so songs were written in private, and those songs will soon be public; born from the same last hurrah ethos that she’s now devoted to, despite the drive to stick around for a long, long time.
