Fever Ray: ‘It’s more dangerous if we are having fun making a revolution’
Ahead of their debut Australian tour, Swedish artist Karin Dreijer, aka Fever Ray, talks art as activism and imbuing politics with humour.
Karin Dreijer is finally — if reluctantly — ready to accept that they are an artist.
Music is something the Swedish artist has been doing professionally for more than two decades, since breaking out in the early 2000s as one beaked half of the revered sibling electronic duo The Knife, alongside their brother Olof. Yet this title of “artist” is not something Dreijer, 49, has ever felt wholly comfortable embracing.
“I’ve never really understood what I am doing, really. I’ve been touring and making music, and I don’t have a proper education or a title. It’s been a bit blurry,” Dreijer tells The Australian over a Zoom call from a dimly lit room in their home in Stockholm, where, they say, it has recently been snowing (“It’s a bit sad”).
Dreijer, who identifies as non-binary, is sporting a clean platinum crop and wearing an oversized black hoodie. It’s startling to see them cut such a clean image, so far removed from the grotesque, sleazeball characters they inhabit as part of their experimental solo project Fever Ray, which they launched in 2009.
When we speak, Dreijer is preparing for their first-ever tour of Australia, where they will perform as Fever Ray at Vivid Sydney and Rising Festival in Melbourne in June.
The Knife, who disbanded amicably (“it should only and always be for fun,”) a decade ago, never made it to Australia. And not for lack of popularity either — the band was one of the defining acts of the era, with a bona fide hit under their belt (the 2002 romantic headrush ‘Heartbeats’)—but because, for the longest time, touring exasperated Dreijer’s anxiety.
In 2018, Dreijer was forced to cancel the second half of the Fever Ray European tour because of escalating anxiety and panic attacks. “For seven years, I did not enter the stage,” they explained at the time. “For five years, I did not enter an aeroplane. It is a disorder that always lurks in the shadows that I have had to work carefully with and around, and that I never really know when it will strike or how much it will affect me.”
When asked if that is something they have found a way to work through, they’re ecstatic to say that this run of shows, in support of last year’s album Radical Romantics, is the first tour they have “really enjoyed.”
Why is that, do they think? “I have learned a lot from previous experiences about how to tour and that I need to rest. I am still a little nervous about long flights, but I’m going to be fine,” they say, adding that they are “super excited” to be coming to Australia.
It’s a change of tune that they also credit to both their band and crew and their “great therapist” who helped them overcome crippling stage fright. “She told me that I should just focus on what it was that I wanted to tell the audience and not think about anything else.
“Something just snapped in my head. I realised I was a storyteller in a long line of storytellers. A lot of people have been doing this before me, and many will come after,” they explain.
Telling stories is something Dreijer does both vividly and obliquely. They have a knack for giving sound to the hard-to-articulate feelings that lie in your guts, but also, when the mood strikes, they can spin a hell of a yarn.
Take the Radical Romantics song ‘Even It Out’ — co-produced by the Oscar-winning duo Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (of Nine Inch Nails fame) — a snarling pop song in which they borrow a move from the Lydia Tar playbook and threaten their child’s high school bully. “This is for Zacharias/Who bullied my kid in high school/There’s no room for you/And we know where you live!” Dreijer scowls. It’s the most vengeful song on a record that is overwhelmingly about love, and all the shame, passion, discomfort, fear and desire that come with it.
With the Fever Ray project, Dreijer, in collaboration with their longtime friend Martin Falk, has created a myriad of characters to represent their different mental states and emotions. There’s Romance, a succubus in a scratchy pink suit, who stars in the video for ‘Kandy’ where they try to seduce Main, a lumpen, grubby office worker. “The characters are different feelings that I want to dig into and find out about,” they explain. “This is how the music starts. I have a strong feeling that I want to stay in and explore, and those characters embody the feelings.”
Asked whether the visual thinking starts when they are writing the music, or if it’s something they expand upon later, Dreijer explains: “I think it’s always in there, in my head, there’s a parallel thing going on. I’m always collecting images, and I watch a lot of film. I want the music to be sort of the conductor of the visual world.”
Dreijer’s music has always melded with their hellraising socialist politics. Presently, they are deeply troubled by the rise of Neo-Fascism in Sweden. The day before our conversation, several masked men, alleged, in local reports, to be neo-Nazis crashed a theatre in Stockholm that was hosting an anti-fascist event, setting off smoke bombs that injured several attendees. “We have an extreme right wing party in our parliament,” Dreijer explains. “I think like 20% of the Swedish population voted for this party. The climate in Sweden has changed a lot in the last five years.”
The way they see it, music can be a useful tool within activism. “It’s super important for people who do art and music to talk about what’s going on,” they say.
But maintaining a sense of humour is vital. Their stomper ‘This Country’ from the 2017 record, Plunge, in which Dreijer sings of “Free abortions/And clean water” is probably their most unabashedly political song to date. But it ends on a line so jarring and absurdly plain-spoken that you can’t help but laugh: “This country makes it hard to f—!”
“I think humour is a great force. It becomes more dangerous if we are having fun while making a revolution,” they say. “Also it’s a healing force, to gain strength. Humour is a great way to deal with heavy things as well. It’s great to be able to laugh at the horrible situation we’re in … sometimes.”
Catch Fever Ray at Vivid Live in Sydney 5 – 6 June and Rising Festival in Melbourne Sun 9 June — 10 June.
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