For nearly two decades, Jenny Hval has been carving out a singular place for herself at the point of intersection between music, poetry, prose, and performance art. With Iris Silver Mist, the Norwegian artist’s ninth album (out May 2 via 4AD), she continues to find new inspiration in both her interior life as well as her surrounding environments.

When the pandemic took live music away from the world, Hval filled the void with a deep dive into perfumes. She became, in her own word, “obsessed,” collecting them, reading and writing about them. She soon realized she was seeking an experience similar to the tactile and emotionally connective nature of performing for a live audience, a different pathway to sensing presence.

Hval, invigorated by her new obsession, began writing demos that she repurposed as the backbone of her 2024 interdisciplinary performance series, I Want to Be a Machine. These shows were a sensory experience. At one point, she placed rice cookers around the stage, filling space with the grain’s sweet smell. Eight of the songs she wrote for I Want to Be a Machine found their way onto Iris Silver Mist. The album, named after the fragrance made by the French perfume house Serge Lutens, moves like a scent, wafting from one enveloping song to the next in an uninterrupted sequence, as they did in I Want to Be a Machine.

Iris Silver Mist’s 13 songs reference scents not only in their form but their lyrics as well. They are filled with sensual imagery, intimate scenes brought to life by pattering drums, otherwordly synths, and regal strings. “A rose is a rose is a rose is a cigarette,” Hval waxes on “To Be a Rose.” Here, she also describes a vivid tableaux of mother and daughter – her mother, to be precise. “I was singing in my room, she smoked on the balcony / Long inhales and long exhales performed in choreography.”

Scent signals vitality as much as it indicates death. It’s a marker of transformation, tying us to our memories and easing transitions. Northern Transmissions asked Hval about the transformative power of scent and sense memory, rebounding from the impersonal modern modes of music delivery and consumption, encountering the works of German dramatist-poet Heiner Müller, and more.

Northern Transmissions: In past interviews, you’ve said that when you make art, you never see a clear path to a singular end; rather, you navigate several possible paths like they’re obstacles. Is this still how it feels when you make art? If not, how has it changed? What specific obstacles did you have to navigate while making Iris Silver Mist?

Jenny Hval: Yes, I work intuitively and don’t really plan much – beyond “Get a coffee first.” I still work like this. I always have. That said, what I have to plan is when to write, to make myself pockets of writing time and space in between other things.

This was the case for Iris Silver Mist also, but I did have some thoughts that were different from some of my previous work. Instead of separate songs, I wanted to have one big music software file with one song after another. I wanted to write something and then have the next song or piece begin inside the previous song. It’s not very complicated. I just wanted to make something that felt like a mixtape. A late-night musical essay.

For months, I didn’t want to write at all. I had very little drive to create or listen to music. The listening part has been the case for years, actually. I have found all this modern distancing from the physicality of music – the endless accessibility and devaluation of music in streaming era, the social media transformation of the artist, the disappearance of music journalism, the empty venues of the pandemic – draining. I don’t feel like listening to something that is just coming from a screen. This sounds really old fashioned and clichéd, but it’s also true.

I became obsessed with scent in 2022, while on tour. My bandmate took me to a perfume shop, and we tried many niche perfumes together. I was struck by the physical experience of smelling different fragrances. First, citrus exploded in the air, then almonds and powder and sad flowers, then roses and musk. I got obsessed. And when I started writing music again after that tour, it coincided with me reading and trying and deciphering raw materials and their use in perfumery. So there is iris, rose, powder, resins, etc. on the album.

Fragrance brought me back to music again and sort of gave it new life. The nose resuscitated the ears. Corny but true.

NT: Being an artist is risky in general risk, but were there any specific risks you took in making Iris Silver Mist, be it in the creative process or the circumstances under which you made it?

JH: I knew writing [in] a mixtape-like format would not be the most accessible way of making songs, but I almost never write for the sake of delivering something that works as singles or on streaming. My label wanted me to think about singles, so in the end, I wrote one song where I actively tried to think, “Get to the chorus fast” and “Have verses and choruses.” But this ended up very ethereal, too, and with nature sounds and the word “palliative” in the lyrics. It’s called “Lay Down” and opens the album.

NT: Why did you name your new album after the fragrance Iris Silver Mist in particular? How would you describe its scent?

JH: The scent is very, very iris, which is usually made from the root of the plant and not the flower. It smells like earth but also milky air, fog, the steam from a kettle of boiled carrots. I feel like it’s made to bring me close to ghosts.

NT: So many of the songs on Iris Silver Mist originated from you open-ended, multimedia I Want to Be a Machine performances. What considerations, if any, went into figuring out how you’d translate the songs to a more focused performance scale? How challenging was it to re-imagine the ways you’d present the songs divorced from their original context?

JH: I wrote the songs for an album, or as demos for an album, and then re-contextualized them for the show. But the show and performances influenced the album a lot with its colours, fabrics, pace, monologues, and scents. There are a lot of traces of textures from the show on the album. This made making the album easy and pleasurable.

NT: What are some ways the songs changed from their original form to their recorded counterparts?

JH: Most of them are not changed, except they may have added drums, vocals, or synth strings. The album needed to be bigger and more emotionally sweeping. Apart from that, this really is a demo album. Some of the tracks even have the first demo vocal from way before the show intact. But the order of the songs is different, and I cut quite a bit of the music material from the show. A lot of the show is not on the album!

NT: What revelations, if any, did this process lead to regarding the question you ask on “I Don’t Know What Free Is,” “I tried to ask / ‘What is a performance?’”

JH: This was one of the tracks that, apart from [the] drum kit and a couple of details, sounds exactly like it sounded as a demo. The vocal is me singing slash improvising the words for the first time. I dare say nothing changed except the context!

NT: On “To Be a Rose,” you sing of behaving in choreography with your mother as she smoked on the balcony and you sang in your room, your actions unintentionally mirroring each other in a way. As you’ve said, the song ruminates on the fact that we all come from somewhere and someone, as well as the idea that one thing becomes another. Besides your and your mother’s shared restlessness, as you age, what qualities of hers do you notice in yourself, whether more and more or for the first time?

JH: I wrote an essay book that just came out here in Norway (no plans for a translation, sadly) about what I can best describe as “being onstage.” My mother features in it, more as a general mother figure, perhaps, as a beloved image of coming from someone, and of my voice belonging to someone. I have always been told I look very much like her, so as we both age, I notice our posture is the same, our hair, our voices have similarities, of course – our level of independence (or lack thereof, depending on the context) and our uneasiness around money.

NT: What is your earliest memory of encountering the work of Heiner Müller? How has his work impacted your own, or general outlook on art and the world?

JH: I first read it at university, 24 or so years ago, and we had to stage a little version of it, too, in class. I found it incredible at the time – mostly because it re-contextualizes the characters of Hamlet in a modern era – but I have kept returning to it over the following years.

I don’t know how it’s impacted on my work, except I’ve written about it several times. It was my first experience of theatre work that was post-dramatic and intertextual in that way. Later, I read Kathy Acker and many others who have rewritten or torn apart classic texts. Perhaps the most important thing I took from Müller’s play was that to be a writer and artist can also be work of criticism.

NT: One of Iris Silver Mist’s themes is change. Do you view change as a necessary marker of vitality without which something or someone isn’t truly alive? What are your thoughts on change as a process that connects everyone and everything to the past as well as the future?

JH: Oh wow, I don’t know how to answer that. If a theme for Iris Silver Mist is change – beyond the changing of textures, entering different rooms, etc. – it is change as a flicker. Every time a change occurs, there is a little flicker of death, or another world, or the beyond. Perhaps change opens you up to the spiritual realm.

NT: Since change is an overarching theme of Iris Silver Mist, I’m curious how your artistic goals or intentions have changed since you released your debut album.

JH: You know, I don’t think they have. At all! Perhaps nothing ever changes.

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