Instead, they demonstrate the care and resolve that goes into maintaining these forms of love: the decisions, the needs, the boundaries, the mistakes, the courage. The more reflective tone and pacing fits the record's lyrical perspective, where romance is never presented as a given or a sure thing - another trope Dreijer gently admonishes. And there's a haunted quality to tracks like "North," where production from Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross add industrial grit and crunch, and "Tapping Fingers," where washes of synth, courtesy of Swedish production duo Aasthma, advance and retreat under Dreijer's forlorn voice. "Looking For A Ghost" is propulsive, thanks to Portuguese batida DJ and producer NĂdia, yet still inquisitive. Dreijer tapped a number of co-producers for the record, including their brother Olof, who imbues tracks like "What They Call Us" and "Shiver" with many of the startling, squiggling synths and syncopated beats that have become a hallmark of their collaborations. Where Plunge playfully clanged and thrilled and fantasized - an urgent, intense, often frenetically paced record - the heartbeat of Radical Romantics is somewhat slower, its mood more pensive. As in much of Dreijer's works, there are no obvious gender roles or puritanical sexual norms to be found in the video, and Dreijer's obfuscation of these classic romantic tropes makes the aching, thirsty emotional core of the work even clearer. That sense of queer freedom is everywhere on Radical Romantics - in the delightfully ungendered pet names ("smoothie," "bird seed") on "Looking For A Ghost" the sapphic eroticism of "Shiver" the depth of their delivery on "Tapping Fingers" or the girlish helium voice on "Carbon Dioxide." It's perhaps most striking in the androgynous characters Dreijer portrays in their music videos - as in " Kandy," where they play both roles in a freaky, sensual encounter: both the bored, suit-wearing office drone in a club's dimly lit room and the grotesque, glitter-speckled, balding singer who libidinously performs for them, eventually tying them to the chair with a mic cable and earning a smile. "I do not have to think about gender so much, which is amazing, because in real life, you have to think about it all the time." "Music works for me as a totally open space," they told Pitchfork recently. This practice of pitch-shifting and vocal processing allows them to perform femininity, masculinity, androgyny - sometimes all in the same song, sometimes all at once. Dreijer's shape-shifting vocals have been a staple of their music since their time as one-half of The Knife, the subversive and now defunct pop duo they formed with their brother Olof. What might make romance radical? For starters, Fever Ray's world feels largely unrestricted by the norms of gender. It is interested in love not as a destination but, as Rich would put it, an ongoing process, and gives a glimpse into the many approaches - bravado and vulnerability, experimentation and hesitation, violence and delicacy - that process requires. Radical Romantics, Fever Ray's new record, looks at love even more broadly: romantic connection, sexual desire, the making of family, the fostering of community, the rewards of commitment. Fever Ray's icy, alluring self-titled debut was created in the isolating haze of new parenthood the follow-up, 2017's magnificent Plunge, is a thrilling and righteous exploration of queer eroticism. In their work as Fever Ray, artist Karin Dreijer has long been finely attuned to Rich's definition of love, using their eerie, experimental pop music to excavate its more complicated or marginalized incarnations.
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