The stage name, the costumes, the masks, the voice distortion – all these things contributed to the mystery and, to some degree, the artistic distance created by Fever Ray, aka Karin Dreijer Andersson. But the themes on the Knife frontwoman's debut solo album were unerringly close to home, and the music was so visceral that you couldn't help but be drawn into her isolated world.
The 34-year-old gave relatively banal subjects, like chatting to a friend about dishwasher tablets, a whole new surrealism. Listening to her sing, "I live between concrete walls", made this incredibly talented Swede sound like a wild animal who some fool had attempted to tame.
Glacial, creepy and impish – this album was all of these things, so why was it also so soothing? Between the cavernous synths, the echoes and loops, the polyrhythms and snarling vocal processing, Andersson managed to capture the feeling of being totally alone while also projecting a childlike wonder. Her perspective of the world might have appeared largely unhinged, but in Andersson's hands even empty streets and triangle walks made a strange kind of sense.
