Jenny Hval has announced that she will release her latest album, Iris Silver Mist, on May 2 via 4AD. She’ll also head out on a short UK/EU tour in support. The record was inspired by a deep dive into the world of perfume, a fascination accelerated by the downtime caused by the physical and emotional distances nurtured by the COVID pandemic. The album itself was named after a fragrance released by French perfume house Serge Lutens and developed by Maurice Roucel. It’s an album designed to reconnect Hval (and anyone else with earshot) with various means of corporeal intimacy, something that we’ve moved away from to some degree in the years since the initial outbreak of COVID.
Our first glimpse, or scent if the perfume theme holds for you, is “To be a rose”, a blossoming synth treasure and a welcome return from one of the most idiosyncratic artists working today.
“‘To be a rose’ was written as a restless pop structure,” explains Hval. “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.”
She continues: “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 video was created as part of a collaboration between Hval and director-editor Jenny Berger Myhre. It’s built from scraps of tour footage gathered from 2015-2024.
“Often we performed on stages or in places that had no screen, or even no projector,” says 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.“
Watch the clip below.
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 *
* w/ Thea Grant
Iris Silver Mist:
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
Iris Silver Mist is due out May 2 via 4AD. You can pre-order the album here. Follow Hval on Facebook, X, and Instagram.
