Fever Ray - To the Moon and Back

Karin Dreijer provokes. She is a rebellious figure that wants to transgress the politics of music and the social politics through her music. With her imageries that rejoice in the aesthetics of the obscure and the grotesque, and her scathing lyrics that push for a feminist and a queer agenda, she makes Lady Gaga's act look mild and puerile.

For her newest single, To the Moon and Back, she greets us acknowledging the 7 years hiatus of her solo project: "Hey, remember me? I've been busy working like crazy". And indeed, with two amazing albums of The Knife in the meantime, we could have very well thought that she wouldn't have go back to her solo project. But here she is, reinvigorated and ready to keep kicking the tight morals in the groin.

The opening synths, obsessive, bouncy and shiny, could almost be the soundtrack of an amusement park, but being Dreijer the orchestrator, she knows how to break them in order to sound creepy. It's the same effect that causes clowns to be sinister: the uncanniness of what is supposed to be familiar and fun, but distorted to a point to make it sinister.

This industrial synth-pop serves to score the kinky seductive game that Dreijer establishes with the listener. She gets very explicit in her demands and finishes with a clear "I want to run my fingers on your pussy", a demand that many purist could find way too over the top, but she is aware that those same purists might be the ones that share social and political views with a man that claimed "Grab 'em by the pussy". Of course, while Trump represent the patriarcal society that subjects women and sees them as mere sexual objects, Dreijer stands for the opposite, a world where women are empowered and able to own and enjoy their sexuality, her act is consensual and fun "First I take you, then you take me", while his is full of hate and repression.

Dreijer wants to swift the meaning of what perversion is. She wants us to understand that It is those who hold double moral standards and abuse others the ones that are the true perverts; on the other hand, the kinkiest kind of sex could be beautiful as long as it is consensual, it is her queer politics that open the possibilities of what individuals can experience with their bodies and that she is showing in her musical experimentations and mixings of styles.