Fever Ray - Plunge

Fever Ray
Plunge
2017
Spotify

It's been eight years since Karin Dreijer released her solo project Fever Ray. The other group she'sin with her brother The Knife are a constant shifting and changing take on electronic music, however Fever Ray has been a more focused project centered around Dreijer experiences with motherhood and deep introspection. This album Plunge however has a great deal more virility to it, with her affected voice screeching through downtempo electronics.  Her voice hovers above it all almost like she is looking down on you from above extolling wisdom. The album is also far more political than her previous especially on the track "This Country". She does not hold back demanding "Free Abortions/And clean Water!" as well as frantically blowing through the ills of the world. It is all soaked in these really grimey electronics, nothing is really precise or clean in the way the sound making them all the more intriguing. "Falling" just bangs and clangs away until Dreijer cuts through with this violence in her voice. Her pitch is actually shifted which gives it this real uneasy almost Bjork type quality and She has the same demons burning inside. However there are times where the things she is saying are celebratory and sexual like on "IDK About You". The song starts creepy and slow but then shifts into this totally percussion fueled blowout. The drums pound, but they aren't really drums and still have that wiggly quality to them, its pretty fucking incredible.

The title track is perhaps the most diverse, exploratory and dancey on the record. It has a great bop, but also manages to move super smooth between somewhat old timey alien sounding electronics. However as with much of the album everything falls into darkness eventually leaving this torched landscape. She even gives you some almost vaporwave inspired tracks like "To The Moon and Back" which harness the genre, but never imitates or tries to work within it. This is wholly Fever Ray music. If you are coming to electronic music looking for straight dance than Plunge might be a bit to heady for you. There are times where she really dives in and it becomes more about the experience than making you move so you have to know what you are getting into. If you allow it, Fever Ray will reveal some things both about Karin Dreijer as a person and what Fever Ray really means to the world as a whole. Interesting stuff, and at times fun stuff but in the end an experience you should allow yourself to have.

8.0 out of 10