Loud Bloom

When the Swedish brother-sister duo The Knife shuttered that project in 2014, sister Karin Dreijer had already established her eerie synth-pop Fever Ray project. But what her brother Olof was up to wasn’t exactly clear. He released a series of anonymous techno twelves as Oni Ayhun, but also remixed South African shangaan electro, produced Tunisian folk artist Houeida Hedfi, and crafted an epic piece that sampled frogs from the Amazon rainforest. And then, a long stretch of silence. 

Dreijer finally re-emerges with Loud Bloom, a solo debut anticipated for decades, revealing the neon-bright throughline connecting all those disparate, far-flung sonic elements of his music. Glints of global rhythms like cumbia, kuduro, and flamenco abound, which Dreijer at times then uses as a platform for a diverse array of collaborators, like Sudanese singer MaMan, South African MC Toya Delazy, and Columbian firecracker Diva Cruz. Rapturous, unfettered in its outpouring of joy, Driejer’s sound design beams as brightly as a tropical bird’s plumage or a vibrant coral reef. Similarly, the dancefloor gestures on the first half of the album suggest movement unbothered by gravity, dancing across the stereo field. Just as luminous is the album’s back half, a sublime drift of ethereal abstraction that brings to mind Brian Eno’s classic balance between song and sound. Call it Another Pink World.