Fever Ray - To The Moon And Back

“Hey, remember me?” asks Fever Ray in the opening moments of ‘To The Moon and Back’, “I’ve been busy working like crazy.” The first new solo material to come from The Knife’s Karin Dreijer under the moniker since 2009, an eight year wait makes this track a long time coming. It’s a point wittily satirised in the matching video, too; a menacing figure being awoken from the cryogenic deep-freeze in order to go to an, erm, BDSM tea party.

Turns out every last second of anticipation for new Fever Ray was worthwhile. While self-titled debut album ‘Fever Ray’ saw Karin Dreijer pitting poison-drenched lullabies against a foreboding sense of unease, ‘To The Moon and Back’ grows a ferocious pair of fangs, and hits the murky depths of a strobe-flickered basement instead. Nicking its title from an oft-repeated idiom (I love you to the moon and back) Fever Ray makes all its all-out kinkiness and explicitness sound, well, very tender. Slinky and pulsing - along with being home to the most-definitely NSFW lyric “I want to run my fingers up your pussy” - this is an ecstatic return in the fearless ilk of Peaches; liberated, queer, sexy expression at its very best.