Karin Dreijer’s debut solo album Fever Ray came out only shortly after Silent Shout, an album that was almost immediately hailed as The Knife’s masterpiece. The inevitable comparisons seeped out, no one was completely ready to accept the more cavernous Fever Ray as any sort of a replacement for the lush maximalism of Dreijer and her brother’s The Knife. Regardless, Dreijer had proved how essential they were to that project and by 2014, the two had disbanded. Fever Ray’s next album Plunge continued Dreijer’s push towards empty space with an angrier and more overtly political edge and simultaneously built Fever Ray into a proper entity in its own right.
Radical Romantics is a Fever Ray album in that its fixations swarm around Dreijer, all their proclivities, and all their vulnerabilities. It’s also the closest Fever Ray has ever sounded like The Knife, whether it be the soaring and anthemic “Shiver”, or the pronounced synths ripples on “New Utensils”. Dreijer’s brother Olof even had a hand in the first four songs on the album, and he gives his tracks and Dreijer’s lyrics a heavier and more outward appearance.
As immaculately produced as all Dreijer’s work has been, the immediacy of Fever Ray’s emotional resonance gave the impression of the artist bestowing the album on a singular listener, the way the best bedroom pop and singer-songwriter records work. The first two Fever Ray albums, for how immaculate they sounded, seemed thrown together, with Dreijer removed from the immense weight of The Knife moniker. Now when Dreijer ruminates about falling in love on “Carbon Dioxide”, the personal considerations are built to fall in line with anything off Deep Cuts.
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross probably have something to do with the added weight. “North” and “Even It Out” are two strikingly disparate tracks, the former, considers the desperation of acceptance and its process, while the instrumentation slowly trudges along until each note and Dreijer’s creaking punctuation questions their own purpose. The latter, “Even It Out”, in its narrator’s pursuit of cutting up their kid’s bully, manages to be the most dancefloor-friendly song here.
At 47 years old, Karin Dreijer’s topics have become acutely drawn towards their own experience, with their voice noticeably tending toward its deeper register. Even at their most obscure though, a song like “Tapping Fingers” drips in the anguish of what Dreijer describes as possibly their saddest song. These moments are rewarding, not just for being as tonally beautiful as any of their previous work, but for sitting quietly next to some of the most upbeat songs released under the Fever Ray umbrella. As a consistent work of songs gestating over many years, Radical Romantics is a remarkable composite of Dreijer as they exist in 2023 and of the emotions that brought them here.
