This Friday, Norwegian musician, artist and novelist Jenny Hval will release her new album, Iris Silver Mist. Following ‘To be a rose’ and ‘The artist is absent’ (“one of the most infectious songs the Norwegian singer-songwriter has laid to tape,” The Guardian), Hval unveils a final Iris Silver Mist preview, album opener ‘Lay Down’.
Just as the scent of iris comes from the roots and not the flower, the album, too, begins underground with ‘Lay Down’. “Lay down, down in the deep where your love comes from,” Jenny sings. Surrounded by soft drums, synths and strings, she emerges from the dirt and into the blue sky, like the root of the iris aspiring to become its scent. When she sings “You had bled through your jeans,” it is both observational and emotional—a sign of what is to come.
Of the track, Jenny says: “We enter the album through lying down in our own grave, under the earth, just like the root, which is the part of the iris that has a scent. It would be the very best time and place to listen to music, wouldn’t it? The fetus can smell and taste their mother’s food as well as hear voices outside the mother’s body in the final months of a pregnancy. Can a ghost in the coffin still hear the birds singing above?”
LISTEN: JENNY HVAL – ‘LAY DOWN’
On Iris Silver Mist, one song bleeds into the next, just like a daughter is connected to her mother, the smoke of a cigarette sticks to a sweater, or the layers of a perfume unfold over time. A perfume, with its heart notes and scented accords, shares its language with music. Both travel through air, simultaneously invisible and distinct. Named after the fragrance made by the French perfume house Serge Lutens, Iris Silver Mist also moves like a scent – between flower and smoke, ghostly yet alive. The album is sensual, tactile and intimate – touching you as smells, sounds, and images do when they multiply.
Iris Silver Mist started with the absence of music; as live music disappeared during the pandemic, Jenny filled the void with perfume. It was only later she understood why: she was searching for another way to sense presence, to fill the emptiness music had left behind. During a series of performances last year titled I want to be a Machine, Jenny performed many of the tracks on Iris Silver Mist for the first time, before they’d been recorded, and surrounded by rice cookers, filling the songs with the misty smell of rice. Starting the album with a performance was quite an unusual approach—and it was also an intimate one. Emphasising the importance of the physical and live elements of music, the album’s thirteen songs hold the experience that was lacking in her life for so long.
Praise for Jenny Hval
“Fragile melodies, star-spun beauty and loveliness aplenty.” – Hi-Fi Choice’s Album of the Month *****
“A strikingly substantive and rewardingly elusive art-pop album.” – MOJO ****
“An artist worthy of the utmost respect and adoration.” – Crack
“RIYL: Female genius in pop music, subtly epic songwriting.” – Pitchfork
“Music’s most playful deconstructionist.” – The Guardian
Iris Silver Mist will be released digitally, on CD and on standard black and limited pearl “Northern Light” vinyl. Orders of the latter made via the 4AD Store will receive a flexi disc of bonus track, ‘I am an instrument’ (while stocks last).
Jenny Hval –Iris Silver Mist
4AD 0814
Tracklist
- Lay down
- To be a rose
- I want to start at the beginning
- All night long
- Heiner muller
- You died
- Spirit mist
- I don’t know what free is
- The artist is absent
- Huffing my arm
- The gift
- A ballad
- I want the end to sound like this
JENNY HVAL ONLINE
