Fever Ray: Radical Romantics review – Karin Dreijer returns sunny side up

There can’t be many more significant 21st-century artists than Karin Dreijer, AKA Fever Ray. In and out of the Knife, their band with sibling Olof, they’ve created powerful, original outsider art in visual media, written an opera and treated gigs like Marina Abramović installations. In smartly choreographed performance, they play with identity and anonymity with thrilling verve, until you never know – or care – who’s singing or playing on stage. Yet their most recent album, 2017’s Plunge, was brittle and abrasive, with euphoria in short supply despite Dreijer’s enthusiastic embracing of queer love.

Radical Romantics is joyous by comparison. Yes, Even It Out is produced by goth potentate Trent Reznor and appears to be a series of threats to a child at Dreijer’s son’s school. Whether the result is darkly comic or hilariously terrifying is unclear. But mostly Radical Romantics is witty, inquisitive about physical and psychological relationships, and less austere than before. The songs produced with Olof are excellent. Dreijer is revitalised on comeback single What They Call Us, while the nervous desire trapped in mounting sexual tension on Shiver and Kandy is something only they can portray so hauntingly.