Herb Sundays 151: Jenny Hval
All dreams and vapor from the Norwegian shapeshifter.
Herb Sundays 151: Jenny Hval
Playlist: Apple Music, Spotify
Art by Michael Cina
Jenny Hval, the acclaimed Norwegian artist and writer, has been one or those artists who I’ve known more about in theory than in listening practice until just about two years ago or so. One of my fave Herb discoveries (and on the Herb 150 playlist) was her song “Conceptual Romance” (Sacred Bones, 2016) which was picked by Okay Kaya (Herb 73) for her Herb playlist. It’s one of a handful of tracks every year that you remember where you were when you heard it. It feels like a new version of pop, an A/B test between two ideas sliding back and forth into view, not as versus-chorus-verse, almost like a crossfader moving between two dreams.
Hurricane Hval hit our infrastructure yet again this year. Whilst researching my Trance playlists (Herb 141 & 142), some of the backstory of The Practice Of Love (Sacred Bones, 2019) album pointed back to the T-word via a Rolling Stone piece:
“I kept coming back to trashy, mainstream trance music from the Nineties,” Hval wrote in a press release. “I don’t mean trashy in a bad sense, but in a beautiful one. The synth sounds are the things I imagined being played at the raves I was too young and too scared to attend, they were the sounds I associated with the people who were always driving around the two streets in the town where I grew up, the guys with the big stereo in the car that was always just pumping away. I liked the idea of playing with trance music in the true transcendental sense, those washy synths have lightness and clarity to them. I think I’m always looking for what sounds can bring me to write, and these synths made me write very open, honest lyrics.”
This was Herb strike two.
So when the new album was announced it felt like time to reach out. Iris Silver Mist (4AD, 2025) is racking up rave reviews (“shows music to be as transient as smoke, and yet an enduringly personal portal to memory, selfhood, the present and the dead.” - Katie Hawthorne, The Guardian *****) is indebted to the idea of scent, a realm that seems to be gaining steam with Herb-fave publications like
’s (Herb 123) Dirt and both devoting a good deal of coverage to fragrance.Paraphrased from the Emma Aars-penned album bio, which captures the intention of my crossfading comment above much better than I could:
Iris Silver Mist continues to change shape, one song seeping into the next…These songs are like one long track divided into different chapters…and it feels like we are listening to a private performance taking place inside the song.
On the track “Spirit Mist,” we hear the Oslo subway, recorded by Jenny on a winter’s day in 2022. And just like traveling on a train, one song smoothly turns into the next, and the next. “It is about moving,” Jenny says about the album, but she means it in a more symbiotic way. Moving on, moving into the sound—as one sound blends with another, as one song turns into the next, as she turns into the music, and her perfume does so, too. As I carry her around in my ears, I wonder if the sounds are coming from the music or somewhere else around me. If the words are hers or something I’m thinking. If the cold marble hallway in the library I’m walking through is part of the music.
I asked the wonderful Caleb Braaten, founder of Sacred Bones, who has released more than 3 wonderful albums by Hval, for a note about what makes her special.
Jenny has one of those brains that just simply sees the world different than the rest of us. She would be in a truck stop in the American Midwest and find wonder. She’s able to see glimmer in the things most people find dull. Like her most recent album dedicated to scents. A sense that is often taken for granted in the artistic process. We’re lucky to be able to experience life through her voice.
I gently chided him for what could be perceived as Midwestern slander, he quickly corrected me (“You must know I love Midwest truck stops”), but the point is made, we are lucky to have our attention and dreamworlds given over to people like Hval. In fact we depend on it for our sanity. Those that can see the thin but endless layer of beauty surrounding the everyday are to be cherished and followed closely.
I love Jenny Hval and I love the Herb Hat!!
need an Herb hat!