Olof Dreijer has made some of the best music of the 21st century, but there’s a good chance even many of his fans don’t know him by name. This is mostly his decision. He first appeared 26 years ago with his sibling Karin as the Knife. When Karin carried on that group’s theatrics and iconoclastic spirit into their solo work as Fever Ray, Olof slipped out of the spotlight. He did a few techno 12"s in the early 2010s—all of them good, one of them (“OAR003 B”) a classic—under the name Oni Ayhun. After the Knife’s final album, Shaking the Habitual, he withdrew from music almost completely. As a white man from Europe for whom feminism, anti-racism, and international solidarity were more important than a career in music, Dreijer figured he was best placed supporting artists less privileged than him—running a music school for refugees in Berlin, for instance, or remixing artists like Emanuel Jar, a Sudanese musician, activist, and former child soldier. “I somehow internalised these big, structural problems and carried them around on my own, and that’s not a way that I can recommend,” he said recently. “I started to feel that we didn’t need any more people like me in the music industry, which was already very white and male. So I stepped back, and it took me maybe ten years to come around from that.”
Safe to say he has now fully come around. Dreijer has spent last few years staging a comeback. He produced four tracks on the last Fever Ray album, remixed music from Björk and Rosalía, and released a record with Mount Sims exploring the sound and cultural history of the steel drum (a staple of Dreijer’s repertoire dating back at least to the early Knife single “Pass This On”). At long last, he began presenting himself as a solo artist, releasing a string of club EPs adorned with his own acrylic paintings and a smiley face that, on close inspection, spells out his name. Now, more than 20 years since the Knife’s debut, Dreijer gives us his first solo album.
Like so much of Dreijer’s music, Loud Bloom funnels elements from an eclectic range of musical styles into something novel and unique. Nearly all of the tracks feature Dreijer’s longtime signature sound: squiggly, pitch-bending synth tones that feel too loose and alive to have been played on keys. The Western musical tradition is mostly sidelined in favor of kuduro, gqom, batida, and sounds too free of familiar musical idioms to be easily categorized. This is both a modest act of resistance against European cultural dominance, and an outgrowth of boredom with dance music as it is today.
The result is a bubbly, psychedelic, blissed-out dance record, as unconventional as it is unpretentiously fun. It’s as if Dreijer is summoning club music from an alternate timeline, one freer from the influence of European and American pop culture. The 4/4 pulse that runs through much of the album comes without any house or techno tropes. Claps, hi-hats, breakdowns, looped basslines—no. Steel drums, alien synths, verses in Spanish, Arabic, and Zulu—yes. Iconoclastic as it is, the music is always intuitive, never arty or avant-garde. “Rosa Rugosa,” “Blood Lily,” “Iris,” and “Coral” present no challenge to the DJ and would go down fine in a club. The vocal tracks do the same, while also presenting a radically global vision of pop music, thanks to guest appearances from Colombian MC Diva Cruz, South African musician Toya Delazy, and MaMan, a Sudanese pop singer whose 2024 track “Dafnino” is the basis for this album’s single, “Echoed Dafnino.”
Loud Bloom works well both as a statement of purpose and an extended tour of Dreijer’s sound world. What it doesn’t do is build on that style, or bring it to new heights. There are no sour notes here; it’s a lovely listen from beginning to end. But you may sometimes get a sense of déjà vu, either because so many of the songs draw from a similar set of sounds, or because you’ve actually heard them before—six of the album’s 14 tracks came out on other records in the past few years. Even the new ones mostly explore well-trodden ground for Dreijer. “Fern Valley,” an eight-minute piece of gently plucked strings, is one of the most striking tracks here, in part because it’s the only surprise. Despite being his long-awaited solo album, Loud Bloom makes the modest impression of a minor work.
Still, the music is inspiring both in content and in concept. Fluid, colorful, all soft curves and smooth edges, it is never confrontational, always friendly and inviting—there’s a smiley face on the cover, after all. Yet it is also an act of resistance: against the musical status quo, Western cultural dominance, and what bell hooks called “the imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” Feel-good party music is usually rooted in escapism, or simple obliviousness, while socially conscious art tends toward the bleak, especially these days. Loud Bloom does something subtly profound: confronts the world as it is, not with doomy critique, but an ecstatic burst of joy.
