Jenny Hval at The White Hotel
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Jenny Hval
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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. New music met spoken passages about art, the body and what performance is 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, strings hover and dissolve, songs drift into one another without announcement, her voice flits frequently between singing and speech. “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. The response has been consistent across the board – a measure of Hval’s standing, and of how precisely the record does what it sets out to do. It also repays repeated listening in a way that few records do.
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, delivered with enough conviction that the distinction stops mattering.
