Fever Ray Radical Romantics Review: A Maverick Artist with Nowhere Left to Go

Karin Dreijer, a.k.a. Fever Ray, begins their long-awaited third solo album, Radical Romantics, with an apologia: “First I’d like to say that I’m sorry/I’ve done all the tricks that I can.” Arriving after four stellar albums as one-half of electronic duo the Knife and a pair of boundary-pushing solo efforts, Radical Romantics proceeds in an almost resigned fashion: making an effort even as it seems to realize that it may not fulfill one’s most ebullient expectations. Indeed, it’s hard not to feel like the album is both implicitly and explicitly tangling with the question of where an artist as singular as Dreijer can go from here.

The album’s opening stretch is a satisfying re-introduction to Fever Ray’s distinctive sound, even if it doesn’t deliver much in the way of novelty. The first four tracks also effectively serve as a Knife reunion, as they’re all produced and performed by Dreijer alongside their brother, Olof. “Shiver” and “New Utensils” in particular are vigorous, lively cuts, bulging with details like the shrill voices that are looped and gloriously become a part of the beat on “Shiver,” clattering up against its thrumming low end. Both tracks use sharp, three-dimensional sounds to evoke the craving of physical touch that permeates their lyrics.

There are echoes of the lithe, melancholic synths of the Knife’s “Pass This On” and the irregular cardiac rhythm of Fever Ray’s “If I Had a Heart” on “Kandy,” but the track never quite gets out from under the shadow of Dreijer’s past work. Those earlier songs use synths to construct sonic landscapes that are equal parts desolate, haunted, and mournful, but the downtempo “North” and “Bottom of the Ocean” feel rickety and threadbare in comparison. The chasm between the soundscapes that the artist concocts here and the similar, more enveloping atmospherics of “Coconut” and “Plunge”—from 2009’s Fever Ray and 2017’s Plunge, respectively—is glaring.

Dreijer does venture into some new sonic territory on “Carbon Dioxide,” a bouncy track that employs strange, piercing string work by Rakhi Singh and Seb Gainsborough to act as a counteragent to the song’s insistent synth-pop pulse. Elsewhere, an electric guitar runs amok on the rollicking and grungy “Even It Out,” the first of two collaborations with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross on the album. The song resonates in large part for its amusing lyrics, which constitute a screed on Dreijer’s part against a kid named Zacharias who bullied their child in school and whom the singer essentially fantasizes about gleefully murdering.

Dreijer packs the 10 songs on Radical Romantics with unsettling but often hilarious stream-of-consciousness observations. The images aren’t always obviously interconnected, even within the same song, but their evocativeness is undeniable. “There’s resounding gongs/And clanging bowls/There’s cats/To guide my soul,” Dreijer sings on “Carbon Dioxide.” Elsewhere, they discuss sex and relationships with both insight and levity on “North” and “Looking for a Ghost,” and poke at gender norms and expectations on “Kandy” and “Shiver.”

In addition to their oddball anthems and sentiments, Dreijer’s signature use of pitch-shifted vocals has been a blueprint for other queer artists like Sophie and Arca to recast and reformulate their gender identity while also setting a mood. As a legacy act for renegade musicians such as these, though, Fever Ray circa 2023 feels admittedly a little quainter than they used to.