Fever Ray Announces New Album ‘Radical Romantics’

The Swedish legend shares details of their first new album in five-plus years, out 10 March via Rabid Records.

‘Radical Romantics’ is the follow up to 2017's ‘Plunge’. Appealing to both the mind and the heart, the dance floor and the bedroom. One of pop's genuine geniuses, Dreijer transforms common, unimaginative clay into eternally beautiful and terrifying forms that mix security and worry with strength.

After finishing the final Fever Ray tour in 2018, Dreijer began work on Radical Romantics in the fall of 2019. She did so in the Stockholm studios she and his brother and fellow The Knife member Olof Dreijer had constructed. Olof joined Dreijer in working on Radical Romantics sometime in the middle of 2020, co-producing and co-writing the album's lead single, "What They Call Us," which was released last month to a flurry of praise, as well as three additional tracks. The siblings haven't created and written music together in eight years until the songs on Radical Romantics.

On the bubbling, electro-pop lead single “Carbon Dioxide,” Dreijer wanted to describe the feeling of falling in love. Reference points span Henry Mancini’s ballpark standard “Baby Elephant Walk” (Dreijer finds it to be the “happiest melody”) to 1 Corinthians 13:1 to Anne Morrow Lindberg’s 1955 essay collection, Gift from the Sea. “I just think that the direction could be nice, happy, full of everything, extra everything,” Dreijer expressed to Vessel during the song’s genesis. Vessel adds, “‘Carbon Dioxide,’ a compound which, being defined by its bond with oxygen, seems to me like a neat chemical expression of the essential compassion that the conditions for life on our planet depend. Compassion and joy; happiness guarded from sentimentality by the absurd and the grotesque; the extra-everything of unconstrained Nature.”