This past weekend, Rob Swire & Gareth McGrillen pulled out all the stops for their festival closing Knife Party B2B Pendulum set. During the first half of the set prior to bringing the rest of Pendulum out, the duo invited legendary Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello to perform their new collaboration live, as well as a live guitar rendition of Knife Party’s biggest hit ‘Bonfire.’ We have known for some time that Knife Party was cooking something up with Morello, but little more was known about the partnership until now.
Our natural assumption was that the track would be released as a Knife Party song, however, following their epic Ultra Main Stage performance we learned otherwise. It’s now been revealed that the tune will be called ‘Battle Sirens‘ and will be released under Morello’s new electronic project Atlas Underground. As witnessed in the Ultra performance, ‘Battle Sirens’ features a heavy guitar buildup and riff—a clear representation of Morello’s contributions—followed by a genre-blending drop with Knife Party’s hard electro  production layered with more heavy shredding from Morello.
It is yet to be announced when Atlas Underground will release any studio material or when the finalized version of ‘Battle Sirens’ will see the light of day. What we do know is that Knife Party has live tested several wildly different versions of ‘Battle Sirens’ over the last several months, and the version we heard at Ultra is likely close to the final product. Stay tuned for more information on ‘Battle Sirens,’ and what should be an exciting shakeup to the electronic music landscape in Atlas Underground. You can check out Knife Party’s Ultra set B2B with Pendulum here; fast forward to 29 minutes to see Morello’s appearance.
