Jenny Hval has been performing onstage for about three decades now: cutting her teeth as a teenager playing in goth bands, making waves with her first two albums under the name Rockettothesky, and, after several successful solo albums landed her a deal with 4AD in 2021, releasing another two records with her husband Håvard Volden as Lost Girls. On the penultimate track of her new album Iris Silver Mist, the Norwegian singer-songwriter ruminates on all those years, “a whole life/ on my dead case/ In and out of spotlights/ washing over me.” The follow-up to 2022’s Classic Objects, named after a fragrance made by Maruice Roucel for the French perfumerie Serge Lutens, doesn’t dwell on Hval’s love of perfume but draws on it as a means of interrogating her relationship with performance. Though ISM has evocative properties for Hval, she was more directly inspired by a comment she came across online that it “would be what the ghost in Hamlet could wear.” It resonated with her, she said, “because it was how I thought of myself as an artist — a ghost from a time when music mattered, still hammering away — and my record, which to me was sounding ghostly and was invaded by hazy, smoky and powdery textures.” Vaporous and haunted, Iris Silver Mist is also gripping and sensuous enough to convince you that it still matters, here and now.
1. Lay down
In several interviews, including one in the lead-up to her new album, Jenny Hval has talked about Kate Bush’s ‘Cloudbusting’ as one of her earliest musical inspirations. Watching the music video in which Bush plays a young boy, she found herself crying uncontrollably. “It’s child and adult at once, and both sexes – it was everything,” she has said. In Hval’s own music, her childish, playful inclinations, especially around lyrics and melody, undercut the heady experimentalism and theory that often frame it. ‘Lay down’ opens the album by interrogating Hval’s role as an artist and performer, and though it starts with the hope of being a child – or allowing her audience to experience music as she did when she was one – she then casts herself as “guardian of the in-between,” which feels more accurate. so long as “in-between” does not preclude both at once. The song itself, soft yet hearty, couldn’t be a gentler invitation to the soundworld of Iris Silver Mist.
2. To be a rose
A strong lead single, ‘To be a rose’ stands out in the context of the album first by coming into contrast with ‘Lay down’: this won’t be a record of hazy associations, it suggests, but something visceral and corporeal. Accented by brass and thumping percussion, the Gertrude Stein-indebted track curiously identifies cigarette smoke as a constant presence in a life of permeable boundaries, where the unparalleled innocence of discovering music as a child is juxtaposed with “long inhales and long exhales performed in choreography” by her mother. It feels not just real but present in the room, which grounds her role as a guide: “Follow me, flower instead,” she sings, her soaring voice leading the charge.
3. I want to start at the beginning
Naturally, the beginning is harder to articulate, the words not quite stringing along into coherent sentences. A whispered dream compared to the guiding light of the previous song, ‘I want to start at the beginning’ is more jarring for the strange absurdity of its longing: the singer situates us outside of her local burger place – back to a time when local felt more real than liminal – and fantasizes about the qualities of a burger that somehow matches her longing: “Juicy, warm, voluptuous, with muscle and fat, texture and resistance, animalic, toxic, tough or tender, burnt, loved… real.” The “I used to be that” that then qualifies the string of adjectives leaves quite a burn, if still raising more questions than it answers.
4. All night long
Drifting through a pandemic haze, laced with fingerpicked guitar and swaying synths, the song reckons with the role of a performing artist in the absence of live music. Yet the more it stretches on, the more the thing that’s disappearing appears as something tangible, historic, or temporary: “I’m lost in absentia/ Dancing on my grave,” she sings, having already suffused the music with the word ghost. “Just a living matter moving through light and shadow.” Moving in between. Moving, still.
5. Heiner Muller
Here the record briefly folds in on itself, an esoteric glimpse of the artist’s mind removed from performance. In referencing her text about a text from the titular dramatist, Hval lands on a lovely simile about meaning sneaking in and out “like a shy kid shoplifting in a department store.” Child and adult at once, artist and performer – reticent even in her rebelliousness, pure impulse, or desperation.
6. You died
The shuffling drum beat and synth chords barely held the song together, which speaks to the almost missing from its title. We quickly infer that the subject in question is in fact a pet, whose smell of aliveness – the first and, for a moment, most important sign of it – prompts a meditation on the impermanence and sheer thinness of human existence. The synths squiggling out of the line “I lean over you like a god” are a delightful touch.
7. Spirit mist
An ominous interlude that finds space for field recordings before an arpeggiated synth washes all those ghost sounds away, picking up speed to bleed into the next track.
8. I don’t know what free is
Though still enchantingly melodic – and gothic – here Hval’s questioning is at its most literal: “I tried to ask ‘What is a performance?’/ What is to write?/ And who is telling it?” Yet the more she strays from a straight answer, the more oblique her poetry becomes, the more fully-fleshed and well, moving, the song sounds; percussive and electronic elements merely hinted at earlier in the record get to bloom in odd directions. And we go back to the beginning, to the maternal, pleading for salvation: “Exhale me with your cigarette smoke/ Like you gave me life, now set me free.” She may not know what it is, but you can sense it in the air.
9. The artist is absent
Riffing on Marina Abramović’s The Artist Is Present, Hval sings the titular words yet writes, in the provided lyric sheet, “The artist is absence.” That’s a bigger hole to fill, yet Hval rises to the occasion by summoning a driving breakbeat that anchors one of her clubbiest and most infectious songs to date, one that cuts itself short of catharsis by ending well before the 90-second mark. It raises the stakes for the album’s final stretch – the encore, if you will.
10. Huffing my arm
Another sequence of interludes, transcribed as: Illegible words, ghost words, ghosts discussing ghost stuff. Tie it to the title: the artist-ghost preparing for the finale, putting on perfume, murmuring in innocent ecstasy.
11. The gift
It is clear by now what the gift is: the stage may be “obviously, literally falling apart,” “a stage without a show,” yet somehow now that it is being dismantled, the artist is literally giving it to us. “Imagine that empty room/ How calm it is, after the storm/ When the world is new,” Hval sings over a sticky dance beat, the opposite of stillness.
12. A ballad
Over delicately woven piano, the vulnerability of Hval’s voice supersedes any kind of conceptual framework. A heavenly choir joins in the background, as if to affirm that some part of her gift manages to seep through the atmosphere; that even as a couple is kissing by the exit doors, they will leave with a sensation firmly imprinted in their memory. “I couldn’t tell you why I keep singing, only how,” she sings, zeroing in on the practical minutiae of performance. But the most piercing line comes later: “It’s so dumb and so me/ To think this means anything/ But it must be better to die in sound than to die dead, right?” Maybe the audience will simply stare back; maybe they will nod, or better yet, remember.
13. I want the end to sound like this
Which is to say: voiceless, serene, optimistic, outstretched, even playful in its ghostliness. An approximation, but real nonetheless.
