The video for “What They Call Us,” Karin Dreijer’s first new song in five years as Fever Ray, opens on Dreijer as a sallow office drone, greenish circles beneath vacant eyes, half-eaten watermelon lying masticated on their desk. Then, they travel via desk chair to darker, torchlit realms, office suddenly yielding to forest. By video’s end, Dreijer is lying in a pile of Xeroxes of their own face and inciting their coworkers into a Matrix Reloaded–style bacchanal. Like every Dreijer visual, it hypnotizes without quite explaining itself, but the overarching theme seems to be yearning from within spiritual imprisonment.
In the past, Dreijer has relished transforming themselves into a mournful bridge troll, a growling demon, an avenging angel. But on “What They Call Us” they sound like no one but themselves, singing the slow, stepwise melody in their tremulous lower range. “First I’d like to say that I’m sorry,” they sing, husky-voiced, eyes burning out of the camera. “The person who came here was broken/Can you fix it, can you care?” Co-produced with their brother, the Knife’s Olof Dreijer, the song seems to be holding its breath for the answer: The bass drum reverberates into high-ceilinged space, while a flanging keyboard provides the neuron crackles of a nervous system seething with need and hurt.
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