Fever Ray

Fever Ray is the title, of both project and album, an evocation of the music's sound, intense and anxious, yet luminous. It's the culmination of work that began in 2007 when Karin and Olof, the brother-sister duo who are The Knife, decided to take time out following a handful of incredible live shows. Their first two albums did well in their Swedish homeland; their third, Silent Shout, went to Number One, won six Swedish Grammys, underlined their reputation as an act capable of the truly extraordinary and was pronounced the best record of 2006 by Pitchfork. 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).