If we're all happy that this is the year of solo girls making electro-pop, on paper, Karin Dreijer-Andersson fits in perfectly. All it takes, though, is one viewing of the video to Triangle Walks - the third single from her excellent debut album as Fever Ray - and any comparison to La Roux, Little Boots, et al dissolves in a puff of smoke.
Half-glimpsed through laser-illuminated gloom, Karin stands motionless in a heavy robe, face painted to a deathly pallor, singing lines that less resemble the concerns of a conventional pop song than some eerie nightmare. "Who is that to come by my house?" she asks, as synths ring like wind chimes in some deserted Japanese garden. "Stands outside my window," she continues. "Sucking on the berries/Eats us out of house and home..." It's pop, of a fashion - but pop scripted by the Brothers Grimm, filmed by David Lynch, and never to appear on any Now compilation, lest it freak out children of the future who might wonder what the kids were boshing out in 2009.
"I have a problem with normal," says Karin - who is not, incidentally, a cave-dwelling witch, but a polite, well-adjusted mother of two from Gothenburg, Sweden. "Normal is something that we have created. All the things we have created around gender, how male and female artists should look, and sound."
Karin first rose to prominence a few years back as half of the Knife, a brother-sister duo who dressed as evil crows in photo shoots and released several albums of pitch-black electro-pop, most recently 2006's Silent Shout. One hallmark of the Knife was Karin's voice, often distorted and pitch-shifted down until it sounded husky and masculine - a tactic that persists in Fever Ray. "And still I read comments online: this is not Fever Ray, this is still the Knife - the dude is still in there!" she laughs.
The music of Fever Ray is slower and less clubby than that of the Knife, inspired, Karin says, by Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man, the sleepless nights that come from raising a young child, and her love for the melodies of African pop and Romanian gypsy music - "but then we use smoke and lasers, which I think is a very nice contrast." Fever Ray play their first ever UK show as part of Brighton's Loop festival tonight. Following a short UK tour, Karin is due to return to work with her brother Olaf to complete - what else? - a libretto about Charles Darwin for Danish performance company Hotel Performa, which premieres in Copenhagen in September.
"It's not about Origin Of The Species, but about the figure of Darwin himself," says Karin. "He was a very modern man for that time - he was very involved in raising his kids, for example. I didn't think of him as that kind of humanist, but it's very interesting from a modern perspective."
Word to Little Boots: let us know when you've finished your concept album about Nikola Tesla and you get the right to call yourself "an artist" again.
•Fever Ray are on tour this week; Triangle Walks is out 20 Jul
