Anna von Hausswolff’s sixth studio album is being trailed as the 39-year-old Swede’s pivot towards pop, which you could say is all relative. For the last decade, Von Hauswolff has dealt in music that is solemn, echo-laden, heavy on the drone of her beloved pipe organ and fully deserving of the adjective gothic.
Her work has elicited comparisons to Nico and Diamanda Galás; 40 years ago, it might have been packaged in a hauntingly abstract Vaughan Oliver sleeve and released on 4AD. She has collaborated with Swans, Sunn O))) and the black metal band Wolves in the Throne Room. Her last album, 2020’s All Thoughts Fly, was a collection of instrumentals, recorded on a replica of a 17th-century German baroque organ in a church in Gothenburg: you can perhaps get some idea of its emotional tone from the fact that it was released on a label best known for releasing doom metal.
One blogger called her “the high priestess” of “satanic harmonies”, a description that caused her trouble. Taking the blogger at their word, fundamentalist Catholics succeeded in getting her shows at churches in Nantes and Paris cancelled: in the former location, protesters blocked the entrance. Clearly, Von Hausswolff doesn’t seem much like an artist out to challenge Sabrina Carpenter or Taylor Swift.
Yet the description of Iconoclasts as “pop” fits, albeit with caveats. It’s far more straightforwardly melodic than her previous work, and it is no stretch to imagine the most straightforward track, the ballad Aging Young Women (a duet with Ethel Cain), on the radio or in the charts: it sounds a little like Lana Del Rey, had Del Rey somehow contrived to end up at the bottom of a well. Though it is perhaps worth noting that Cain is not the key collaborator here; nor is Iggy Pop, who turns up on another ballad, The Whole Woman, his baritone croon possessed of an affecting wobbliness at 78. It’s avant garde saxophonist Otis Sandsjö, whose music was winningly described by Jazzwise magazine as “intentionally puzzling”: suffice to say, his is not the first name you would think of were you planning a full-scale storming of Spotify’s Hot Hits playlist.
Sandsjö is everywhere on Iconoclasts, his sax leading the instrumentals Struggle with the Beast and Consensual Neglect, his woodwind arrangements adding a note of warmth to the title track and The Mouth, his playing alternately raw – there are moments when you can hear his fingers hitting the keys of his instrument – becalmed and driving: the skronky funk of his performance on Struggle With the Beast powers the track for nearly nine minutes. And yet, you couldn’t describe his contributions as dominating: there’s too much else going on.
Iconoclasts is a long album – it lasts the best part of an hour and a quarter – but it still feels crammed with sound. There are heaving synthesised drones that, in their intensity, occasionally evoke the sound of Fuck Buttons’ 2009 masterpiece Tarot Sport; explosions of fizzing noise; cinematic orchestrations; and drum patterns that marry a ritualistic-sounding thunder to rhythms that variously recall the pulse of dance music, the glitterbeat stomp of glam, and even reggae. Von Hausswolff is less inclined to erupt into shrieks and ululations than she once was, but her singing still has a blazing forcefulness that cuts through the echo she is frequently doused in.
It’s music that feels as if it’s in constant motion, amplified by the fact that the melodies, rich and beautiful as they are, seldom adhere to any standard verse-chorus structure: the songs here usually end up somewhere very different from the place they started. Indeed, its maximalism might be too overwhelming to take in one long sitting.
But if it is too much, it’s too much of a good thing: with their sense of movement, their twists and turns, their radiant tunes, their emotive power, these songs are exhausting because they’re exhilarating. For an album with a worldview summed up by a striking line from Facing Atlas that declares life on Earth “full of shit and full of evil”, that ponders ageing and paralysing depression, and on which it is frequently unclear whether the songs are dealing with something personal or with current events (“the sky is crashing down upon the ships of freedom … the life we had has vaporised into the sky”), its overall mood is a kind of frazzled euphoria. The songs surge and build, the bursts of noise feel cathartic. It’s as if the music is fighting against the tone of the lyrics, urgently pressing forward despite everything. “I’m breaking up with language,” Von Hauswolff sings on Stardust, “in search of something bigger.” In the strange, unique, expansive, impassioned and experimental take on pop presented on Iconoclasts, she seems to have found it.
What Alexis listened to this week
Sampha – Cumulus/Memory
Co-written by Romy of the xx, but left off Sampha’s 2023 album Lahai, Cumulus/Memory is two songs in one, changing tempo midway through but united by a reflective, small-hours mood.
