A haunting, slow-burning exhale of rage, clarity, and catharsis, “All the things that aren’t you” is Sophia Hansen-Knarhoi at her most visceral – a stormy, spellbinding reckoning of voice, cello, and raw emotional truth, and a breathtaking highlight off her darkly beautiful debut album ‘Undertow.’
“All the things that aren’t you” – Sophia Hansen-Knarhoi
There’s a moment, two minutes into “All the things that aren’t you,” where stillness turns into something seismic.
Until then, the song barely breathes: Just aching oohs, spine-chilling cello pulls, and the slow swell of a world gathering storm. It feels like holding your breath underwater – suspended, weightless, waiting for the surface to break. And when it does, when Sophia Hansen-Knarhoi finally sings her first words, the impact is devastating. This is a song that haunts; a song that watches you from the dark corners of your own memory. Brooding, brutally raw, and unguarded to its marrow, “All the things that aren’t you” is less a composition than a reckoning – intimate, visceral, and utterly all-consuming.
Atwood Magazine is proud to be premiering “All the things that aren’t you,” the fourth and final single taken from Sophia Hansen-Knarhoi’s breathtaking debut album c, out tomorrow (November 14th) via Ba Da Bing! Records. Co-produced by Hansen-Knarhoi and Randall Dunn, Undertow is a stark, corporeal world built from voice, cello, field recordings, and the unfiltered emotional truths that fuel the London-based composer and singer/songwriter’s work. Following singles “Crying in Pastel,” “My Mother and Me,” and “Afraid,” this new release is the album’s heaviest exhale – a slow eruption of rage, clarity, and liberation.
Hansen-Knarhoi frames the song with blistering honesty, explaining, “This track captures a moment of rage, a realisation of being treated in a way that only served the other person, without regard for mutual connection, and a recognition of this as a pattern from the past. It poses a sense of freedom through this recognition of negligence.”
She lets that fury speak plainly in lines that land like blunt force:
On my way to heaven
I hope you die first
I want to feel wild
You make me feel mild
Every word is deliberate, sung slowly and methodically, as though she’s carving them into stone.
The world of the song feels alive with weather and memory. As she describes, “Set to the backdrop of a field recording of a torrential storm, the cellos interchange in glissandos. There is a lot of space for the world of the field recording, with the distant ‘oohs’ give an impression a feeling from the past, a meandering thought before a moment of clarity. The field recording itself was taken the night of a huge storm. As I recorded from my windowsill, a tree in the bushland across from me was struck by lightning, and burst into flames.”
It’s as though the environment itself is complicit in the anger – rumbling, burning, warning.
When the words do finally hit, they hit with gusto and grace – bare teeth out for something more than blood.
Hansen-Knarhoi continues, “The scathing lyrics come in with force and a grittiness, accentuating their dramatics, feeding the rageful delivery. The vocal melody glides with the cello glissandi, we hear whispered trails of the lyrics, and bold echoed backing vocals. The double bass feels as if its closer to moving in the world of the rumbling thunder.”
Forgive me I’m ruthless
When it comes to you
And when I say I want to be alone
I don’t think that’s true
I want to be surrounded
By all the things that aren’t you
That interplay between voice and instrument is central to her work, but here it feels especially visceral – as though the cello isn’t accompanying her so much as shadowing her, breathing with her, bracing for impact. Its low, rumbling scrapes churn like emotional undercurrents, giving the song its heaving weight; every glissando rises like a shiver up the spine, every bow stroke landing with the force of something long buried finally surfacing. The cello feels alive in this piece – not ornamental, but elemental – a second voice that growls, trembles, and aches in lockstep with her own. It becomes the terrain the song moves through, the storm front she’s singing against, the body carrying what the lyrics haven’t yet said.
“The cello is widely considered the closest instrument to the voice,” Hansen-Knarhoi explains. “This is something that continually bleeds into my practice, finding the connection between voice, cello and body. The physicalization of this combined practice creates a sense of corporeality in my sound. I let it be intuitive, my playing and singing guided by my breath and the way my body moves. I found the duality of this expression informed reflections of sensuality and intimacy throughout the album.”
The music video – a stark, haunting series of intimate portraits – extends that physicality. Shot in shifting light, sometimes on land and sometimes in water, sometimes staring directly into the camera and sometimes drifting far from it, the visual captures the raw humanity at the core of Sophia Hansen-Knarhoi’s work. Nothing distracts; it’s just her, her body, her breath, and the storm she carries.
As Undertow arrives tomorrow, “All the things that aren’t you” stands as its emotional rupture – a moment of brutal truth delivered with poise, corporeal force, and a haunting beauty that lingers long after the last note falls. It’s a powerful entry point into the world Sophia Hansen-Knarhoi has built: Stark, storm-lit, and unflinchingly honest. If the album traces a journey toward clarity, this track is the flash of recognition that makes everything that follows impossible to ignore.
Stream “All the things that aren’t you” exclusively on Atwood Magazine, and let yourself be consumed by all that you’ve been trying not to feel – courtesy of the singular, spellbinding Sophia Hansen-Knarhoi.
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“All the things that aren’t you” – Sophia Hansen-Knarhoi
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© Milda Ambrozaite
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