Yr Knives

Yr Knives is a Chicago instrumental quartet built around two guitars working in tandem. The band pairs guitarists Andrew Trim and Brian J Sulpizio with bassist Douglas McCombs and drummer Quin Kirchner, four players deeply woven into the city’s overlapping rock and jazz scenes. McCombs is a founding member of Tortoise and a longtime fixture of Eleventh Dream Day. Sulpizio is the constant behind the long-running project Health and Beauty, and works widely as a recording and mixing engineer. Kirchner is one of Chicago’s most active drummers across jazz and rock, with a solo album that earned an 8.0 from Pitchfork. Trim is a jazz-trained guitarist and a first-call collaborator on the city’s improvised music scene.

Two of them come up as rock and roll players and two as jazz players, and the music lives in how closely they listen across those languages. The result is exploratory and dynamic, centered on two overdriven guitars that merge into something neither could produce alone, and it shifts from one performance to the next. The band has toured supporting The Messthetics, and its debut album is Begin Yr Singing.