Fever Ray: Fever Ray [MUTE]

Why you'll love it

This Mute pressing comes with a printed insert carrying the lyrics and credits. It's the record where Karin Dreijer stepped out of The Knife and built a whole new world of slow electronics, pitch-shifted voices and Nordic gloom.

This edition

• Printed lyric insert
• Pressed in the USA

About the album

This album sounds like the small hours, lights off and the house asleep, with something strange humming in the dark. Karin Dreijer, who started playing guitar at ten and once worked as a web designer, made it under a new alias after years as one half of The Knife with their brother Olof, and it arrived in January 2009.

"If I Had a Heart" opens with a deep, droning synth and a voice pitched down to something primeval; years later it became the theme for TV's Vikings. "When I Grow Up" is the closest thing to a pop song, while "Seven," "Triangle Walks" and "Keep the Streets Empty for Me" shimmer and creep. Christoffer Berg and Van Rivers & The Subliminal Kid helped Dreijer produce it. Dreijer's voice swings between shrill highs and deep, pitch-shifted lows, a trick that makes one singer sound like a whole choir of strangers.

Masks, face paint and gauze screens followed on stage, and the record's spooky glow still hasn't faded. Ideal for long Toronto winters, or for anyone who finds ordinary synth-pop a bit too cheerful.

Also at Kops: more Fever Ray on vinyl · browse Electronic

Tracklist

Listen

On Mute (cat# 9408-1), the 2009 album.