Here we go again: I am boringly cis and straight white male, so I always need to be careful about what I say, because I am naturally going to be ignorant of many things, because I don’t have to experience them myself. I am in many ways shielded from the world. This is just part of my learning process and I hope people can be patient with me.

While my last post was just me thinking out aloud, I think this is more celebratory and thus more in the spirit of Pride.

Who is Fever Ray anyhow?

Before there was Fever Ray, there was The Knife, a swedish sibling duo of Karin and Olof Andersson. I first encountered them probably late 2003 when their kind of a novelty hit Handy-Man came out.

It’s from the soundtrack to a Swedish movie called Hannah med H, which I’ve never seen. My second encounter with them was actually an earlier video called Pass This On.

It took me years to realize these were the same act. Handy-Man is almost like something based on KLFs book on how to make a number 1 hit (although it apparently didn’t chart very strongly despite being played on MTV Europe all the time in those days). Pass This On is a great, if quite off-beat love song with a video about inclusivity in a way I don’t think I had seen before. It was kind of jarring in the best possible way even though it is kind of tame by today’s standards (and it’s only been 20 years and there is still a lot of people who would eagerly rail against it).

But that was their strength. They didn’t have to follow any specific formula, because they did not give a fuck. Also, they were very private. Although they both appear on the video for Pass This On, we barely see Karin and Olof is not exactly a main character either, although he is featured more prominently.

Here’s a fun incident with Fever Ray.

You know how most people kind of get settled on specific kind of music in their teens? Well, The Knife weren’t really interested in working with a record company, so they formed their own using a government grant. With that money they made one my all time favorite albums, their third, Silent SHout, which came out in 2006 and I was almost 30 at that point.

I kind of remember my first experiences with it. Streaming wasn’t really an option for me, so I actually had to order it online. At first, I didn’t really know what to think of it. The soundscape was weird and unsettling, but the gothic overtones were great. After that, I listened to it several times a day for a pretty long time. It is one of the CDs that I didn’t give away when I got rid of most of my collection.

The Knife made one more album before calling it quits (although they did take part in making an opera about Darwin). They didn’t release it until 2012. The marketing was as anti-fame as ever. The pair appeared in 80s style overalls and blonde wigs and any photos there was of them was always from behind so that you couldn’t even tell which one was which. They also had been reading gender theory at the time and it was a major influence on the double album. Not a masterpiece like Silent Shout, but a magnificent piece of art anyhow.

The duo formed a cooperative with their touring staff and perfomers, and went on an extended tour before finally officially breaking up as a band. They still work together (they remixed a Björk song recently as The Knife and they coproduced much of Fever Ray’s latest album) and they still own their own record company together, but they are mostly on different paths now.

Okay, so moving finally to Fever Ray, Karin Dreijer’s solo project. They (Karin has expressed in Swedish media that they prefer ‘hen’, a nonbinary pronoun in Swedish, so I’ll use ‘they’ for Karin, but I will also make it complicated) have, thusfar, made three albums: the self-titled debut, Plunge and Radical Romantics. Each is an excellent album and very different from each other.

First was Fever Ray in 2009 between the last two The Knife albums. Its a very gothic album. Even if you have never heard the album, some of the tracks have been used pretty widely in movies and trailers, including the lead single If I Had a Heart, When I Grow Up, Keep the Streets Empty for Me, Now Is the Only Time I Know and Concrete Walls.

Next up was Plunge in 2017. Their sound is now more varied and aggressive. There is a kind of feel of lashing out. While the previous album was very reminiscent of the Nordic coldness, this was in your face. While there had been political themes in both Fever Ray’s and The Knife’s music before, this was unabashedly that and did not shy away from being confrontational.

Finally, we have Radical Romantics in 2023. Here’s a collaboration I wasn’t expecting: Karin worked with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross on two tracks (Nine Inch Nails being an old favorite of mine). The album explores new weirdness in pop. Its kind of about love, but there is different kinds here from wanting to be wanted to feeling the need to protect your children.

Now, Karin takes a very different role on each of these albums and here’s where we get to my head canon. On their first album they are a witch, who is shedding parts of their identity to reach something unknowable. On Plunge they have shed their gender and are now a pure tabula rasa. On Radical Romantics they have built something completely new and outside of our limited spectrum of gender.

Their look in the Fever Ray era was very conservative in comparison to their look on later projects.

Now, to be clear about the sections below, I’m not using these neo-pronouns about Karin, I’m using them regarding the characters they play. When I first heard of someone using ‘it/its’ pronouns, what came to my mind was their Plunge era look. A kind of disturbing, genderless being. Not disturbing for being genderless, but… you know.

Later, when I stumbled on someone using the ‘fae’ pronoun (in a Magic: the Gathering tournament of all places), it felt cringe-y at first, but when I looked into it, it made sense. And there definitely is that kind of an alien feel to their character in the Radical Romantics era. Especially with the smiles.

While these albums are outwardly separate projects, in my mind they form a character arc. Again, Karin is very private, so we can’t really know how much of all this is their actual personality and how much is just my parasocial musings. Also, I’m not trying to enforce any kind of new forms of gender. This is more like encouraging people to explore if that is in them in any way.

And finally, if you haven’t had enough of them already (and you shouldn’t have), >here’s an hours worth of their music from a sort of live performance for ARTE.

They are one of my all-time favorite artists. Their body of work might not be as large as that of David Bowie or Tom Waits, but the amount of variety in their work is incredible and while their first commercial releases might not have been that good, they have since then produced music of both great quality and great originality. I already used the word ‘alien’ before, but that is fitting. Like many of my other favorites, like the aforementioned Bowie or Tilda Swinton, those limitations most of us face just don’t seem to apply to them. But at the same time, they also seem to be very human. They just happen to have that extra level of understanding of the condition.

Also, their politics seem to align with mine. Remember that cooperative they formed when touring with The Knife? Inclusivity is also a common theme in their art, especially during their days in The Knife.

What is there not to love?