Cigarette smoke is Jenny Hval’s Proustian madeleine. An acrid, earthy scent drifts through the Norwegian experimentalist’s ninth album as she recalls childhood memories and beloved pets, and retreads the stages of past performances. On vampy lead single To Be a Rose, with restless drum machine and jazzy brass, Hval transforms a rose stem before embellishing further: “This is every cigarette my mother ever smoked.”
Surreal, dreamlike logic permeates Iris Silver Mist, named after a fragrance by French perfumer Maurice Roucel. When the pandemic stopped live music, Hval became interested in how a scent – like a song – can evoke a vivid memory or hint towards something long forgotten. Some of her new tracks do both: I Want to Start at the Beginning opens with Hval marking our location in a burger joint’s car park, but the rest dissolves into staticky synth, indiscernible voices and a drone that sounds like a sunrise.
Many songs cycle through feverish visions of the stage, some with beery audiences and “couples kissing by the exit door”, others silent yet full of possibility. Hval fantasises about a “stage without a show” on The Artist Is Absent; the teasingly short track’s rolling breakbeats and looming bass create the record’s most kinetic, sensuous moment. (Anticipating her listeners’ needs, Hval has also released a hypnotic extended cut – fittingly generous for an album that celebrates listening so profoundly.) Iris Silver Mist shows music to be as transient as smoke, and yet an enduringly personal portal to memory, selfhood, the present and the dead.
