A recommendation from Oprah is enough to launch any book into the bestsellers list, but it still can’t explain why one 1999 work of Black feminist thought has recently become the designated emotional handbook of the heartbroken. If you’ve not read All About Love by bell hooks, you’ve probably had it recommended to you – or at least seen extracts on Instagram accounts like @savedbythebellhooks, where stills from the 90s teen show Saved By the Bell are matched with lengthy quotes on patriarchal masculinity and revolutionary struggle.
The book offers very useful definitions of love, Karin Dreijer is explaining. More than just the emotional goo that fills our private lives, love can be a political force. “It’s an action, it’s a verb, it’s something that we do,” the Swedish singer and producer says. But loving each other “requires time – and it’s hard to find the time that it takes to have good relationships within our capitalist system”.
We’re talking about hooks because Dreijer’s new album as Fever Ray is also about love, and because the theory-inclined pop artist likes to do the reading before tackling a new subject – especially one this familiar.
While none of the high-contrast synthpop of Radical Romantics is likely to crack Steve Wright’s Sunday Love Songs, Dreijer’s third solo album comes straight from the heart, landing tender as a bruise.
On my screen Dreijer is a pale, still figure, sporting a platinum crop and a hoodie emblazoned with the word PSYCHIC. They pause for long stretches to locate the right word. “To be able to love,” they continue, “you have to find out about yourself and what your own needs are, and you have to accept them, which can be super difficult. With that comes a sort of sadness, which I think is much more present [on this album]. But it’s not like a devastating sadness – I think it’s a very peaceful and calm sadness that shows here and there.”
A new Fever Ray album is a rare occurrence. After splitting off from the Knife, the political electro-pop vehicle formed with their brother Olof Dreijer, Fever Ray’s landmark 2009 solo debut explored the frustrations of motherhood via banks of frozen drones and memorably odd lyrics about plant care and kitchen sinks. Its follow-up took eight years: in 2017, Plunge honked the horn for Dreijer’s queer sexual epiphany with a stack of jittery dance tracks and explicit lyrics. Plunge was “more urgent,” says Dreijer, “like, ‘This needs to come out now!’”
The pandemic provided Dreijer with a different headspace for their third album, Radical Romantics. “I realised that I haven’t been so good with patience. That is something I really have had time to practise during the last years, to be still with a feeling. Some things,” they announce in mock revelation, “will work out by themselves without you having to do so much about it.”
Dreijer has previously flown a flag for socialist, feminist and genderqueer politics through the use of pitch-shifted vocals, elaborate masks, queer drag and demands for “free abortions”. An album about love might seem a bit pedestrian in comparison. Yet there’s something deliciously nonconformist about Dreijer turning to love songs aged 47, in a new phase of self-discovery. “Who am I while wanting you?” they sing. “Are they laughing at my thin skin?” It sounds as though Dreijer has taken a step back from living on the edge. That “peaceful sadness” seems to come from a reckoning with age, and what they might have missed out on. “Because I’m quite old now,” they offer, “when you discover things at this time in life, there has been a lot of time when you didn’t know.”
The music moves slower, too. Brother Olof brings his inimitable palette of drums, synths, bongs and squeaks, pulling instruments together in endlessly satisfying knots on Shiver, New Utensils and Kandy. Other borrowed brains include Portuguese producer Nídia, who builds a clattery batida rhythm under strangulated vocals on Looking for a Ghost, and Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, who underpin the album’s darkest moments with tape hiss and industrial fuzz. Carbon Dioxide is the big one, a symphonic endorphin rush from the mind of British experimental composer Vessel, which breaks down into stadium-sized trance as Dreijer’s voice soars: “Holding my heart! While falling!”
Dreijer’s gift as a songwriter is the ability to lace intimate observations and droll humour with occasionally sinister thoughts (“nothing is more fatal than an angry man,” they sang on the Knife’s Neverland) and outre ideas (the “bucket of tiger pee” from the Knife’s Without You My Life Would Be Boring). On Radical Romantics, their words remain tough nuts to crack, but between the lines there’s a heightened vulnerability. There are apologies – the album’s opening line is “first I’d like to say that I’m sorry” – and delicate questions: “Can I trust you?” they ask on the sex-starved Shiver, “I just wanna be touched.”
The lovesick dynamic comes to life on Kandy, a sensual slow dance with a Knife-esque shimmer. In the video Dreijer plays two characters: one the monstrous love interest, with stringy blond hair arranged in a tonsure, who does a lapdance for the other Karin, a sweet-seeming office drone in a bald cap. They think they’ve found love, says Dreijer, describing the force that’s taken hold: “I don’t care what they do to me, they can strangle me, but I just want to be seen by this person.”
It’s a dangerous and familiar dynamic, a “crazy high feeling you can have for a lot of activities and people and stuff. You know that it’s probably not the best thing to do, but it’s there and it’s very tempting.”
Therapy was one experience behind this questioning album. After doing that, “the world becomes so much bigger”, Dreijer says. “If you don’t know why you get anxiety it will just keep on crippling you … When you know more about yourself you will also be able to play around with your fears.” There’s a similarity, I suggest, between therapy and kink, as Dreijer explored in Plunge: both involve working out what pushes your buttons. Dreijer allows a tiny smile. “There is always the dangerous route,” they say vaguely. “It’s always there as a choice. I know I have to use my boundaries to say no to this thing, whatever it is – a person, thing, act – because it’s not wise and healthy for me in the long run. But it can be so amazingly amazing, short term.”
Not all of the album is so respectful: Even It Out is a playground revenge fantasy about taking down their child’s bully: “We know where you live,” Dreijer warns excitedly, “then we cut, cut, cut, cut!”
“A friend said, ‘I’ve never heard a track where a grown-up person is threatening a child.’ Oh? Is that what I’m doing? I didn’t see it. You get very angry and frustrated when nothing is done about those things. It’s always the absence of adults that were supposed to be there and prevent these things from happening,” they say indignantly. “But this is art.”
Dreijer lives in Stockholm with the younger of their two teenage children. “I am definitely more free now,” they say with regard to parenthood. “It’s not the same kind of care you have to provide.” Despite living in a country famed for its gender equality laws, Dreijer has felt suffocated by traditional roles. The irony, they argue, is that Sweden’s childcare policies once made it so easy to have kids that women ended up falling into old-fashioned roles anyway: equality for men and women isn’t the same as individual freedom from expectations around gender and family.
“Now we have this neo-fascist government,” says Dreijer of the new coalition, which is backed by the far-right Sweden Democrats, “but back then it was social democratic. There was this idea that women and men should have the same rights to a career, so you got paid parental leave and you could share it. That is a great idea, but at the same time it’s a hard question: do I want kids or not? It was there for everyone, it was so easy.”
It’s the unquestioned acceptance of these norms that bothers Dreijer most. The first Fever Ray album balked at the constrictions of motherhood, a world of “dishwasher tablets” and “concrete walls”; one early Knife track, Forest Families, recoiled at growing up in the suburbs, where girls “learn to stay fit” and how to do makeup.
after newsletter promotion
Their first taste of the music business was similarly disappointing; as the only woman in smart 90s indie outfit Honey Is Cool, they found themselves labelled as a “girl band” in a male-dominated industry. Forming the Knife in 1999 allowed Dreijer to contort their feline, almost elastic vocal style across a genderless spectrum, while the duo hid behind masks. In the 00s, their laser-cut electro epics were the chic alternative to the cock-rocking synths of Justice and co, attracting a legion of asymmetrical haircuts and misfits who preferred their indie discos “polysexual”. According to Fever Ray collaborator Peder Mannerfelt, the Knife are “like semi-gods” in their home country.
Dreijer builds a barricade around their outsider identity on What They Call Us, the spiky opener to Radical Romantics. Who is “us”, exactly? “I’m not a binary person,” they say, picking their words carefully. “Being brought up as a girl and not having the words for understanding what you are, it’s just something very itchy. And every time you try to break out from that you’re being punished in some way.” But gender is “just a very tiny part of the shape-shifting” that Dreijer is investigating. Their changing costumes, characters and vocal mutations are also about exploring emotions and challenging fear: “If I say this [lyric] from this body, with this voice, what will that do with my fear? How will this be perceived?”
After the second Knife album, Olof moved to Berlin to forge his melodic sensibilities into pristine techno under the alias Oni Ayhun. Returning to Stockholm a few years ago, he began a new career as a youth worker, but more recently the musical urge has returned.
“Did you want to talk to Olof as well?” asks Dreijer, and I realise that he’s been next-door the whole time: the siblings have built their own studio with a window in the dividing wall so that they can keep an eye on each other. Olof enters, bespectacled and soft-spoken, and reveals that as well as producing on Radical Romantics, he’s been making dance music again for the first time in a decade.
The Knife “had very, very strict ideas” about what they were doing, he recalls, which on early albums Deep Cuts and Silent Shout meant “packaging socialist and feminist messages in a very colourful pop format”. Their fans didn’t always clock the politics, but then the lyrics were pretty abstract and their biggest hit, Heartbeats, was ultimately a love song, albeit one of epic electronic proportions.
By the time of 2013’s Shaking the Habitual, when shiny synths were dropped in favour of rackety industrial acoustics, the Dreijers had become “very deadpan and serious”, he says. They did extra reading for that one, taking ideas from gender studies and postcolonial theory and focusing on the process of songwriting more than the results. But “now I’m much more interested in making songs that give some kind of feeling of coping with the day and giving energy”, he says, brightly. “I’m not at all interested in experimental music any more.”
For Karin, politics remains paramount: “When you have been working with [these concepts] for a long time, a lot of it stays in your backbone.” Plus, there are “so many different ways to be political within music – where you play, who you work with, what kind of equipment and instruments you’re using”. (Fever Ray’s touring band is a case in point, a collective comprising almost entirely women and non-binary musicians, dancers, technicians, even drivers.) The Plunge show was a thrill ride of muscle costumes, lusty choreography and throbbing new versions of old songs; rehearsals for a new tour are already under way.
The slower pulse of Radical Romantics might suggest that some of Dreijer’s youthful political vigour has faded. But in its place is a new grey area to be explored. Working with creative director Martin Falck, Dreijer has been adding gentler textures to the surreal cinematic world of Fever Ray, where prosthetics and bald caps bump up against cinematic references to David Lynch and Pedro Almodóvar. “On the last album everything was very extrovert, and I think this time around the stillness is a bit of a challenge to work with. It’s not as explosive, not as ‘fun’, in that sense,” says Dreijer, mentioning the awkward lapdance in the Kandy video.
The upshot is the realisation that “it can be very beautiful to be still with strong, heavy emotions. Even if your first instinct is just to run away, kill somebody or fuck somebody, or do something to ease the pain for a bit,” they laugh. Dreijer doesn’t do drugs, so they lean towards the physical. “But I think it’s very beautiful to be able to sit still with the shit that’s going on, and to accept that this is going on now, and to just hold it. And then it’s not scary.”
Radical Romantics is released on 10 March via Rabid Records
Stay connected with us on social media platform for instant update click here to join our Twitter, & Facebook
We are now on Telegram. Click here to join our channel (@TechiUpdate) and stay updated with the latest Technology headlines.
For all the latest Music News Click Here
