Jenny Hval has announced a new album, Iris Silver Mist, which is due for release on May 2. The follow-up to the Norwegian artist’s 2022 LP Classic Objects is led by the single ‘To be a rose’. The track arrives with a music video, edited by Jenny Merger Myhre, that’s composed of footage shot on various tours from 2015-2024. Check it out and find the album cover and tracklist below.
‘To be a rose’ is subtly yet relentlessly shapeshifting tune, one that treats its pop format and titular metaphor with Hval’s signature playfulness. “’To be a rose’ was written as a restless pop structure,” Hval explained in a statement. “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.”
About the visual, Myhre added, “Often we performed on stages or in places that had no screen, or even no projector. 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.”
The origins of Iris Silver Mist date back to the pandemic, when the absence of live music led to Hval’s growing interest in perfumes. The album is named after a fragrance made by the nose Maurice Roucel for the French perfume house Serge Lutens, which is described by a press release “as smelling more like steel than silver. It is cold and prickly, soft and shimmering, like stepping outside on an early, misty morning, your body still warm from sleep. A perfume, with its heart notes and scented accords, shares its language with music. Both travel through air, simultaneously invisible and distinct.”
Iris Silver Mist Cover Artwork:
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