Though the language of sound which Karin Dreijer speaks to us as Fever Ray is oft alien, its movements in body and (e)motion are universally bound by the same substance of blood and flesh as ours. Radical Romantics, Fever Ray’s third studio effort, is very much a coagulation of that other-worldly energy writhing through human limbs, and in this instance, she approaches a subject as over-wrought as love with an eccentric discourse that sees it in several very new dimensions. Beginning the listen with a fraught apology, Dreijer is able to steer the grotesque nature of heartbreak through peril, rebound, the purely horned, the sapiosexually-stimulated, and a glow of rediscovering love through many portals designed by the heart’s electric pulse (and at times, production by her former Knife-mate and brother, Olof Dreijer, and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of Nine Inch Nails.) It’s Dreijer’s being who is the ultimate force in it all who is able to triumph an intimately rhythmic conquest over the terror of the experience. The strobing bass frequencies and experimental pop magic she sings through are merely the medium in which we realize that same energy exists within us, too.

Highlights: “Shiver”, “Kandy”, “North”

Fever Ray’s Radical Romantics is available now on Mute / Rabid Records.

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