Are you ready for this?
After 8 years (8! Years!) She’s back. Fever Ray has already released a new song titled “to the moon and back” and an s&m creepy and at the same time compelling video to go along with it. The whole album will be available on streaming services online tonight (Yasssssssssssssss) at midnight, just in time for Halloween. The album’s titled “Plunge” and it will be the Knife’s Karin Dreijer’s second solo project to date. You can find the track listing on Pitchfork, as well as an excerpt of a stream of consciousness by Fever Ray herself.
Here’s hoping for a narrative, a concept album even that will greet us tonight, dealing with love, flesh, desire, age, gender, sex, pain and conflicted identities – heavy lyrics all wrapped up in sweet kabuki melodies and twitching tweaking electronic sound.
So, while we wait (what’s a few hours compared to eight years, right?) I’d like to take a peek at “to the moon and back” (no connection to the savage garden single. Well, maybe the general topics of them both do have some similarities).
These are the lyrics:
Hey, remember me?
I’ve been busy working like crazy
I know you like tangerine
And your kiss is sweet and creamy
Oh, can you imagine
A friend sticks for us to bump in
Oh, I’m done looking
Now things can start happening
Hey, remember me?
I’ve got so much, just come and get me
I play something catchy
You lean forward and kiss me
First I take you then you take me
Breathe some life into a fantasy
Your lips, warm and fuzzy
I want to run my fingers up your pussy
Now, we may take them at face value, and read them as a lusty love song between one person to another woman, preferably as one woman to another if we co it’s all there. But we may also read it as a renewal of vows between an artist and her listeners. Her voice tells us, almost apologetically that she’s been doing things, creating something new for us all this time, she didn’t just disappear. Fever Ray’s voice goes on and asks the listeners, repeatedly, if we remember her. And then comes this line, saying “I play something catchy/you lean forward and kiss me”. This could be a way to describe the tensed relationship between a singer and her crowd, knowing that if her music will be more mainstream she may be accepted more easily, perhaps.
From there the lyrics continue to describe a mutual inflicted extasy, a very direct talk, that again, represents intimate relations between two individuals and at the same time may represent the intimacy between artist and her crowd. There, in the gap between the music and the listener, a fantasy is allowed to come to life.
And to top it all we have the way Fever Ray chose to appear in the video, that, along with a few more visual teasers on her YouTube page suggests we’re in for a dark delve into the human syche, one that combines the broken and beautiful parts of the soul, all rolled into one.
Well. Is it midnight yet?
images with words 