Norwegian musician, artist and novelist Jenny Hval today announces her new album, ‘Iris Silver Mist‘, out May 2 via 4AD/Beggars. On Friday, May 30, Jenny Hval will play in the Muziekgebouw, Amsterdam.
With the announcement she shares her new single “To Be A Rose”. About the song, Hval says: “’To be a rose’ 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 different 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.”
The accompanying music video consists of footage filmed during various tours from 2015 to 2024 and was edited by Jenny Merger Myhre, who was responsible for the visuals during the 2015 tour. “Often we performed on stages or in places that had no screen, or even no projector,” zegt Myhre. “As a result, what I filmed would often not be visible for the audience, and so the act of filming became the performance. Using an old VHS-C-camera, I would film parts of the shows as a ritual of seeing and being seen. When we did have a screen, the camera was directly outputting to the video projector, and I loved the moment of going from ‘live footage’ to rewinding into backstage moments, preparations, and previous shows, allowing time travel to happen in real time.”
Instead of starting with music, “Iris Silver Mist” started with its absence. When the pandemic eliminated live music, the smell of cigarettes, soap, and sweat from warm stage lights and shared bathrooms was replaced by non-physical, algorithmic listening at home. Suddenly, and for the first time since her teenage years, Hval became interested in perfumes. Smelling, reading, collecting, writing—she immersed herself in scent while her music was silent. It took her a year to understand what was happening until she realized it: she was looking for another way to experience physical intimacy. Where music had turned into a void, she filled it with scent.
‘Iris Silver Mist’ is named after a fragrance created by perfumer Maurice Roucel for the French perfume house Serge Lutens. The scent is described as smelling like steel, more than silver. It is cold and stimulating, soft and shimmering. A perfume shares its language with music. Both travel through the air, simultaneously invisible and distinctive.
‘Iris Silver Mist‘ is extremely sensual, tactile and intimate—it touches you the way scents, sounds and images do. During a series of performances last year, entitled I want to be a Machine, Hval played many of the songs on ‘Iris Silver Mist’ for the first time, before they were recorded, and surrounded by rice cookers that filled the songs with the misty scent of rice. Starting an album with a performance was an unusual approach—but also an intimate one. Highlighting the importance of the physical and live elements of music, these songs capture the experience that Hval had missed for so long.
Tracklist ‘Iris Silver Mist’
- Lay down
- To be a rose
- I want to start at the beginning
- All night long
- Heiner muller
- You died
- Spirit mist
- I don’t know what free is
- The artist is absent
- Huffing my arm
- The gift
- A ballad
- I want the end to sound like this
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