After years of relentless touring with artists like Andy Bell, fronting the legendary German synth-pop band Boytronic, navigating personal loss, and undergoing creative recalibration, James Knights returns with Supernatural Lover, the bold new release from his dark-electro alter ego KN/GHTS. Where his debut leaned into pure, carefree energy, this record pushes into deeper emotional territory without losing the boom-boom pulse of the dancefloor. The result is an album that balances sweat, catharsis, and club euphoria in equal measure. We caught up with Knights to talk about how life on the road reshaped his songwriting, honoring his HI-NRG lineage, bringing punk energy to electronic pop, and why sometimes the simplest songs hit the hardest.
I read that you’ve said people might be surprised by Supernatural Lover in comparison to your first album. What did you mean by that, and what was the impetus for this record?
The first album was finished in 2019. At that time, I didn’t really have any plans other than just making an album for the fun of it, just pure fun. So at that time there was no pandemic, no Brexit. In that time since the last album, I lost a couple of friends as well. It was quite hard to actually knuckle down and really make a record because everybody knew me for this like “happy fun record” that I made before. I think I struggled for a little while to figure out how I could still sound like KN/GHTS but also touch on a few of these subjects that had happened. So, I had six years to get used to this process. But maybe when you listen to it the first time, it might not be as “easy” as the last record.
Six years is a long time! What was that process like?
It always takes me such a long time to finish anything and I like to work on things for a long time, but the main reason is because I’m always touring and I’m always playing live. That’s kind of the fun part, that’s the easy bit. I enjoy that so much, I don’t want to stop. And then all of the songs just take too long, and there’s not so much time in the studio to finish anything.
For readers who may not know your earlier history, how did you first get into writing music, and how did projects like Scarlet Soho and Boytronic shape your path?
I started to write music properly when I was about 16 and that was a college band and I think we tried to emulate like the New York Dolls dressing up in whatever we could find. My first thing wasn’t even electronic, it was just me and friends trying to make music. It was pretty bad but we did that for a few years. I couldn’t say that I wrote my own actual proper song until I was maybe 20 in my first electronic band, which was called Scarlet Soho. Then I got a phone call in 2015 that they heard me sing and would I be interested in stepping into the Boytronic role to make a new album and do a tour? It was a bit of a whirlwind because it was a much bigger project, much bigger shows. I was a big fan of the band anyway, so it was like my brain was just like, this is insane!
Your live performances are often described as chaotic, physical, even feral — very different from the stereotypically “cool and still” electronic act. Where does that energy come from?
I think that stuff comes from how I grew up, maybe because of this New York Dolls sort of thing, all of my early bands, we couldn’t really play. Everything was just about posing and showing off. I mean, I love Kraftwerk, but I don’t want to be Kraftwerk on stage. I’d rather have a good time. I want to make electronic disco music, but I also want people to actually feel an energy with it and a power and an intensity that you would get from a punk rock show.
You spend a lot of time in Germany, and there’s a strong continental electronic and Italo-Disco tradition there. It feels like that scene influenced your writing on this album?
When I talk about making music at the start in England, all we knew was all of the obvious stuff, really. So it was like… Ultravox, Depeche Mode, Human League. But when I went to Germany the first few times, I was like, whoa, there’s a load of other stuff that I didn’t hear before. And then I think the more you return and the more you go back and you go to some clubs and you hear, you’re inspired just by a different approach. So, although I kind of dabble in Italo disco, it’s like there’s probably some weird English fusion going on in there because you can’t say that it’s one or the other, it’s just everything all at once.
And you’ve got live dates coming up, including Germany and a London show that fans can find on your socials. What can fans expect from this run of shows?
That’s right, we always do something in London! So we’ll do London on the 29th of May, my birthday weekend, and have a big birthday party.
You recently toured with Andy Bell of Erasure, who told you your music reminded him of Divine and that dark, edgy, high-energy disco era. Do you feel connected to that lineage?
Other than the fact that I just really love it, I think there’s a really big peak where around that time songwriting meets production and the technology is great and everything for me seems to come together and there’s not so much compromise on the sound quality. It’s strange to me in a way that trying to even replicate those things all these years later is so hard to do. It should really be quite easy, but actually it’s much harder I think because the digital approach saves a lot of time in the studio, but at the same time you lose something else. But there’s such a depth of quality music in that decade that I think some of it was untouched. People find out about it right now and there’s these gems that come up and there seems to be no end to it, really. I think so much music was released then.
Speaking of Erasure, you also covered Yazoo’s “Goodbye 70s.” What’s your philosophy on doing a cover of such an iconic song?
I have a sort of weird take on cover versions. Some people think if you want to do it, then you should change it wholesale, like make a fast song slow or add an orchestra or something. But I think you need to keep the essence and the magic of where the song came from. So for me, we just made it a little bit more high energy. But the changes are quite subtle. They’re not huge. The biggest change is the voice. Going from female voice to a male voice is the biggest change. But we didn’t need to change any more than that, really, because the song’s great.
The title track “Supernatural Lover” became a big moment during the Andy Bell tour. What makes that song work so well live?
It was really fresh because I think we hadn’t played it live before and it’s great because in the outro, we would get people to sing the chorus with us. It was brilliant because like all of the shows, everyone just sang along. They never heard the song before, but by the end they knew it. The power of it is in its high energy and simplicity.
The album closes with “Can’t Cry Any Longer,” which feels much more vulnerable than the high-energy tracks. How did that song come about?
I wrote that with a lot of things in mind, because I had a friend who passed away around that time and everything was a bit dark, to be honest. I wrote that song without thinking about the album at all. There was a long process of deciding whether it should even be on the album, because I have this sort of high-energy, disco-like audience as well, and I didn’t know if it would be a bit too much for them and maybe they wouldn’t accept it. But I think it definitely worked and it has a place on the album.
The album is also out on vinyl, and the tracklist really feels like a “light side/dark side” split. Were you thinking about the physical format while sequencing it?
If you look at it like a vinyl, the first side was made with the same producer so that was kind of like one feeling. The second side, every track is made with different producers. I didn’t put that much thought into that really but then when it came to making the track list, it just made sense to have a light side and a dark side.
The vinyl just came yesterday actually. Red transparent vinyl. It looks really cool. I always put a lot of thought into the physical formats. The CD version actually is completely different, has different bonus tracks. I always mix everything up.
You mentioned a new video as well — what can people expect visually?
We’re cutting a video right now for the track called “Nightmares.” We made a video in a forest, and it’s kind of like me running through the forest, being chased by stuff. It’s a real low-budget kind of thing, but we’ll try to make it as good as we possibly can.
Finally, Loverboy was named after the hit song by Mariah Carey. Do you have a favorite Mariah Carey moment or song?
The only anecdote that I can actually think of is a little bit embarrassing, but when I was about maybe 14 or 15 years old, I got dumped by someone. When I went home, I turned on MTV and “(Can’t Live If Living Is) Without You” was playing and I burst into tears and cried my heart out. At least for the next six months. I think my mom had a live video of one of the performances, and we used to watch that quite a lot. But the main takeaway was me crying.
KN/GHTS Merch/Vinyl Available Now KN/GHTS Tour/Band Info Interview by George Alley Photo: Ekaterina Yakyamseva
