For Karin Dreijer, Fever Ray is not just a cool alias. Fever Ray is a character—many characters, actually. These guises are brought to life through the Swede’s sinister art-pop, as well as through costumes and visual concepts that complement her music’s subversive pull. When she first emerged as Fever Ray in 2009, Dreijer took several forms: a bleach blond gothic witch, a painted skeleton, and, memorably, a gurgling enigma with a melting mug. These outlandish looks filled out the foggy world of Fever Ray while simultaneously making it even more mysterious.
Since then, Dreijer’s life has vastly transformed: The Knife, her beloved project with her brother Olof, disbanded; she divorced her husband; and she embraced a long-simmering queerness (and Tinder). Those changes are reflected in her new LP Plunge, a radiant emanation of Dreijer’s reclaimed carnal desires, a celebration of community, rebellion, and sex. “At one time I thought the album name should be Fun,” Dreijer explains over Skype, referring me to a photo of French artist Thomas Mailaender’s butt tattooed with the word. “It was a very, very, very important direction, as a contrast from the past.” She decided that Plunge’s physical manifestation would need to express the same excitement and joy of sexual freedom and curiosity.
This reincarnation is most apparent in album trailers and her video for “To the Moon and Back,” where she takes the form of both a smiling, bald sex slave and a self-described “monster” whose cracking skin is largely covered by latex. Talking about the nature of her various characters, she says, “They are very different, but they also have many similarities. It’s more about the character of emotions, like you how wake up and feel that specific day. There can be very many different ones that fit into one body.”
Dreijer dreamed up her latest visions alongside her creative director, Martin Falck. The pair have known each other since the days of Fever Ray’s first album, and Falck designed the artwork for the Knife’s 2013 record, Shaking the Habitual. After hearing an early version of Plunge at Dreijer’s studio, Falck felt that the music exuded an aggressive fluorescent orange, a far cry from Fever Ray’s moody dark purples, browns, and blacks. He tells me the colors suggested a change, “a feeling that anything can happen here.”
As collaborators, Dreijer and Falck prefer to communicate on a purely visual level. “Sometimes there’s more information in an image or color than in actually writing words,” Falck says. “I can understand Karin’s whole mood just by the pictures she sends me.” And the two send each other many images every day, at least 10, along with a healthy helping of emojis and hearts. While creating the visual world of Plunge, they combed through Tumblr, Instagram, and vintage fetish magazines, searching for pictures that embodied the album’s guiding themes, including sex positivity and determination. Dreijer and Falck then compiled their digital clippings of bondage gear, sexual propositions, and latex into a massive moodboard. Here, the pair share insight on some of the strange and surreal images that informed Plunge.
Martin Falck: It was funny to see how queer Mr. Freeze was. He was so scary! But here he has this silk bow tie! He sort of looks like Uncle Fester. And then also he’s not super evil. He just likes diamonds. But the world doesn’t wanna give him diamonds, so he needs to freeze everyone.
Karin Dreijer: I really loved all the Batman films.
KD: Martin showed it to me, and it has a lot of really beautiful pictures of DIY kink costumes.
MF: I learned a lot from Karin about kink and BDSM. Before, I had this basic idea about it being just black latex and leather. But she showed me that that’s not the way it has to look. Karin started to talk to me about kink classifieds and how to meet people, and at the time I was doing a project on this ’70s UK magazine AtomAge, which was just one big kink classified. I was like, “Whoa, this is fate.”
KD: We’re into the same things.
MF: AtomAge was this a really amazing magazine, and there’s this feeling that people were really doing it just because it was their kink. They invested so much time and effort into making these costumes, even having this community through the magazine.
MF: I loved and hated “Married... With Children.” It gave me this horrible feeling of anxiety. It had this weird feeling not knowing what it was. Everybody was just so weird. And then they were all sort of bossed around by this complete douchebag asshole who’s so repulsive.
KD: I watched it just because of Kelly. When I was growing up, she was the ideal girl that everybody wanted to look like, but it was impossible. I mean, we were all 18 and full of acne.
MF: But I think Kelly was an activist. You felt that she was somehow fighting Al Bundy by just being cool and lazy and never doing anything. She had this punk thing around her.
MF: There was a Buzzfeed article about what lazy people do, which became super important. It connected with this idea me and Karin were talking about how can you be really provoking as a woman or a queer person—you have this feeling that you always have to overachieve, you can never be lazy, you have to be happy, approachable, always ready. We were thinking: What if these characters that we come up with don’t know any social conventions? Like, they don’t know that, as a woman, you shouldn’t smile all the time?
MF: Exactly. And that’s when we came up with this sort of laziness, like a queer body that’s just very lazy. I think John Waters has also been into those territories a little bit, where people don’t feel the need to contribute or make up for something.
Permaid Mermaid, “Tea Time, Brentwood Manor”
KD: There are so many ideas about what mothers should be like. When you become a mother, it’s not only that your sexuality is supposed to go away, it’s like you’re supposed to stay at home and only take care of your kids, blah blah blah. There’s so much oppression.
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KD: I think we ripped these hands off. With Fever Ray, live, I’ve always worn gloves. I think there’s something super private about hands. I really like the idea of not showing too much skin. We created this rubber suit for a video, and the idea of a second skin is very important. It is something that you can try to feel a little bit safe within, because it can be rough sometimes. Gloves and second skin are quite necessary.
MF: It was important to have her in there.
KD: She’s a mom.
MF: She’s a mom, she’s sexy, she’s hardcore, she’s doing her own thing. She’s having fun blowing up trucks, but it’s also a little bit difficult for her, you know? As an action hero, she’s one of the greatest. A male action hero wouldn’t be allowed to encompass everything that her character can.
MF: Things don’t have to look the way you think they do, and humor can play with your expectations of what things can be. So instead of having this black rubber ball in your mouth if you’re doing some kink play, why can’t you just have a cheeseburger ball gag and be just as sexy?
KD: This brings some imagination and humor into kink, and I’m very up for that. We have talked about making this with real hamburgers, that would also be very nice.
MF: Food, fetish, everything in one!
