2023 Albums of the Year #9: Fever Ray, Radical Romantics
Dec. 23, 2023
Radical Romantics, the third album by Fever Ray was released in April. I bought a copy on red vinyl which is a beautiful sight to behold. I listened to a lot when it was released but eased up a bit until listening to it a couple more times while writing this list. It’s a great collection of songs, probably better than their second album “Plunge”. The cover art is just as scary though.
The first track “What They Call Us” is a call to arms regarding identity and has a lyric that tapped into a lot of things I’ve been thinking about identity and the ongoing culture war. I love how the art work for this album really challenges the standard notions of aesthetic beauty: it’s full of demonic illustrations and gothic fonts. There’s a lot of orange and red. It really suits the way Fever Ray also plays with their voice, pitching it down for the most part to play against pre-determined notions of gender, but occasionally also pitching up to create humour and childlike innocence.
Once you get around how their voice changes in and around and between the songs, their tenderness and calmness starts to creep up on you. I hadn’t realised how much I’d just imported “Candy” as a song, I just sing along every time it comes on. “North” is devastatingly beautiful and “Tapping Fingers” really homes in on a modern romance. In other places, romance gets conflated with the very business of being and living - perhaps that’s the reason for the album’s title - songs like “Shiver” and “Looking for a Ghost” aren’t just about how scary relationships are, but also about just how scary life can be sometimes.
Many reviews have singled out “Even It Out” as being a bit against the grain with its lyric of “there’s no place for you / we’re gonna even it out” as a response to a bully of one of their children. But I like that song, it’s saying that we can call out people for hurting us, we can stand in solidarity of the oppressed and even it out.
For me, the highlight of the whole album is “Carbon Dioxide”, even though I must have listened to it almost a hundred times I am still not sure what it’s about. Part of the reason I like it is the glorious production, the whole song is a giddy jaunt from start to finish. It would sit awkwardly among all the love songs if it weren’t so self assured. I think it could be a hymn to carbon dioxide, a sort of perverse celebration of the very thing that threatens the future of all humans. Or it could be a metaphor… I’m still not sure.
As per all Fever Ray albums - based off three data points - the final track is an instrumental built on vocalisations. This is the track that is most reminiscent of The Knife’s “Shaking The Habitual”, despite it not being one of the tracks that reunites Karin and Olof. And yes, I listened to “Shaking The Habitual” for the first time in years a few weeks and that album still sounds weird even now. “Radical Romantics” is not so odd, in fact it’s a brilliant blend of the radical and the romantic that I will be listening to for years to come.