Jenny Hval at The White Hotel

Iris Silver Mist, Jenny Hval’s ninth album, arrived last May having started life not in a studio but on a stage, as a theatre piece. For 2024’s I Want to Be a Machine – written in response to Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine – Hval stood at an easel and read aloud while her collaborators played around her, and rice cookers (yep) emitted scent into the space. Glitching, hymnal music was cut through with spoken passages about art, the body, and the question: what is performance actually for?

The album that followed kept the question open. Named after a Serge Lutens perfume that Hval has described as making her feel close to ghosts, songs drift into one another like smoke, strings hover and dissolve, Badalamenti synths and birdsong giving way to deep house and organ stabs – while her papery falsetto arches above it all, threatening at every moment to vanish. “I think I’ve made an album that very much places music in between life and death,” she said on its release. Pitchfork gave it an 8.0; the Guardian five stars.

Hval has been a singular presence in experimental pop for over a decade – across Blood Bitch, The Practice of Love and Classic Objects, she has consistently resisted repetition while staying recognisably herself. She is also a published novelist, and that literary sensibility runs through everything: her lyrics move between the intimate and the oblique, and land somewhere unexpectedly funny more often than you might expect.

Live, her recent shows have woven new music and spoken word into something that sits between concert and performance art, without making a fuss about it. Those who’ve been describe them as haunting, joyous and menacing all at the same time. Hval doesn’t play Manchester often, and The White Hotel feels like the perfect venue for her. If you’re a fan, this one is worth the effort.