Fever Ray

Insound Staff Pick - 2009! A decade into her career, Karin Dreijer Andersson - former singer of 90's pop group Honey Is Cool and one-half of The Knife - needed to take some time off. She now returns as the solo artist Fever Ray. Fever Ray is the title, of both project and album, an evocation of the music's sound, intense and anxious, yet luminous. Unsure how to get them over the finishing line, she took half her newly formed songs to Christoffer Berg (who mixed The Knife's work), half to Stockholm production duo Van Rivers & The Subliminal Kid for a final brush and tickle.

The result is Fever Ray, an album that, while recognizably the work of the same artist, is dramatically different from The Knife. It's still constructed on electronic foundations and embellished with traditional instrumentation (guitar here, congas there), but Fever Ray is starker, moodier, in places quite somber - less an invasion, more a slow process of colonization.