Karin Dreijer aka Fever Ray smiles mischievously from the cover of her new album entitled »Radical Romantics«. But the smile is made grotesque by the white-painted bald head and several strands of hair hanging down. Similarly, the ten tracks move between dark theatricality and bizarre euphoria. She has already proven that Dreijer has many faces since she founded the duo The Knife with her brother Olof Dreijer in the late 1990s. The fact that in a strange way »Radical Romantics« is both a retrospective and a prospective is also due to the fact that her brother took part again in some of the song production after eight years. The Knife nostalgia mixes with a peculiarly haunting Goldfrapp sound and runs deep: »Love’s Carbon Dioxide«, sings Dreijer in the single release that carries the album’s name. From the opener »What They Call Us« to »Bottom Of The Ocean«, Fever Ray takes us on a journey between emptiness, longing and ecstasy. In doing so, Sweden’s Karin Dreijer has maintained the gloom of her self-titled debut, topped it off with the radicalism of »Plunge« and come full circle to The Knife. As if IAMX and the Chromatics had fathered a child older than the two American bands themselves. The strange case of Karin Dreijer
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