Out now: Jenny Hval – Iris Silver Mist

Norwegian musician, artist and novelist Jenny Hval releases her new album, Iris Silver Mist. Earlier in the week, Jenny Hval unveiled the final preview, album opener ‘Lay down’, which followed ‘To be a rose’ and ‘The artist is absent’.

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.

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?”

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.

Stream / download Iris Silver Mist here.