The video for “What They Call Us,” Karin Dreijer’s first new song in five years as Fever Ray, begins with Dreijer looking like a sallow office buzz, greenish circles under vacant eyes, half-eaten watermelon munched on his desk. Then they travel via desk chair into darker, torchlit realms, and the office suddenly gives way to the forest. At the end of the video, Dreijer lies on top of a pile of photocopies of her own face and urges her coworkers to array reloaded– bacchanalian style Like all of Dreijer’s images, it mesmerizes without quite explaining itself, but the overall theme seems to yearn from within spiritual imprisonment.
In the past, Dreijer has enjoyed transforming himself into a sad bridge troll, a snarling demon, an avenging angel. But on “What They Call Us” they sound like no one but themselves, singing the slow, stepping melody in its tremulous lower range. “First I’d like to say I’m sorry,” they sing, their voices hoarse, their eyes burning off-camera. “The person who came here was broken / Can you fix it, can you care?” Co-produced with his brother, Olof Dreijer of The Knife, the song seems to be holding its breath for the response: kick drums reverberate through the high-ceilinged space, while a flickering keyboard provides the neural crackles of a nervous system seething with need and hurt. .
