Jenny Hval has announced a new album, Iris Silver Mist, due out on May 2 via 4AD. It’s the follow-up to 2022’s Classic Objects, and it’s named after Maurice Roucel’s fragrance for Serge Lutens. Here’s more from the press release:
Rather than begin with music, Iris Silver Mist began with the absence of it. As the pandemic led to no live music, the smell of cigarettes, soap, and the sweat from warm stage lights and shared bathrooms was replaced by unphysical, algorithmic listening at home. Suddenly, and for the first time since she was a teenager, Hval found herself growing interested in perfumes. Smelling, reading, collecting, writing—she immersed herself with scent while her music was put on hold. It took her a year to understand what was happening, until she did: she was seeking another way of sensing physical intimacy. Where music had turned into a void, she filled it with fragrance.
The first single is “To be a rose,” which builds from minimal and percussive to lush with sounds. Hval says it was “was written as a restless pop structure. It has a chorus, with chords and a melody, but each chorus sounds slightly different, like we are experiencing the melody from diferent seasons, decades or even different bodies. The clichéd rose metaphor in the song is equally restless. It can change shape into a cigarette, and then evaporate to smoke. My mother and I (two restless humans) are both present in the song: ‘I was singing in my room, she smoked on the balcony/Long inhales and long exhales performed in choreography.’ If about anything, ‘To be a rose’ is about how one thing becomes another thing, how we all come from somewhere and someone, and how this is stranger and more powerful than we think.” Watch the video, featuring footage shot on tours over the last nine years and edited by Jenny Merger Myhre, below.
Hval has shows lined up this spring in Europe and the UK, and you can see those below as well.
JENNY HVAL – IRIS SILVER MIST TRACKLIST
1. Lay down
2. To be a rose
3. I want to start at the beginning
4. All night long
5. Heiner muller
6. You died
7. Spirit mist
8. I don’t know what free is
9. The artist is absent
10. Huffing my arm
11. The gift
12. A ballad
13. I want the end to sound like this
JENNY HVAL: 2025 TOUR DATES
Sat. April 5 – Madrid, ES @ Electrónica en Abril
Wed. May 21- London, UK @ Islington Assembly Hall *
Fri. May 23 – Brussels, BE @ Le Nuits Botanique
Tue. May 27 – Berlin, DE @ Silent Green (Betonhalle) *
Fri. May 30 – Amsterdam, NL @ Muziekgebouw
Thu. June 5 – Oslo, NO @ Parkteatret *
* with Thea Grant
