Staring at the flat white courtyard of my Gmail inbox, I imagine stale dust, empty hallways and hospital corners — emptiness. It smells like nothing, and as a new email slots into the sedate crowd, I glance toward a small glass, perfume bottle on my bedside table.
It's through this sense-deadening portal that I'm talking to Jenny Hval about Iris Silver Mist, the Norwegian artist's ninth studio album, named after Maurice Roucel's perfume for the French house Serge Lutens. The record is scent-obsessed, a flowing suite of songs that rises and spreads like vapour over stages and balconies and palliative beds. Juicy burger drippings, roses, cigarettes, bloody denim and birthday candle smoke hover in the air, an overwhelming sensory experience that further expands the scope of Hval's boundless music.
I don't feel I'm in the right headspace to ask about it. I raise the near-empty bottle from the table to my nose and take a whiff — it's meant to smell like the air after rainfall. It isn't quite right, but it's something.
"This time, I needed to rediscover my nose and sense of smell to rethink my relationship with sound," Hval explains. "And I needed to write one song after another in an overlapping, long-form document. I needed to think like an essayist."
These "essays," while informed and coloured by the nostalgia-tickling, transporting world of smells and scent memory, is less a journey through the nose than it is across the stage, across the page, across the airwaves. On Iris Silver Mist, Hval explores what it means to be a modern performer more intently than she ever has before, attempting to find embodiment in a world of spirits.
A 2024 show called I Want to Be a Machine featured earlier versions of songs that would eventually become Iris Silver Mist and included wheeled instruments, sound engineers that acted as band members, costume changes, and cooking rice that filled the venue with its milky scent ("That is also a composition," Hval notes). A book by Hval, published recently in Norway, is called Scenemennesket — "'the stage human' or 'the human on stage,' or something like that," she explains.
"They all examine what it means to be a performing artist in this era of streaming, post-pandemic dwindling ticket sales, general disengagement with music and public space," Hval explains of the trio of works. "Artists are in a way ghosts now, or becoming ghosts, whether we want to or not. A friend of mine said it so beautifully, except she was saying it about the art critics: we are ghosts that don't know we are ghosts, but everyone else knows."
On the brief, breakbeat-driven "The artist is absent," Hval speaks to this otherworldly disappearing act: "The artist is absence / They have left the building." Iris Silver Mist is an attempt to step back into the body, a call from the artist to be heard (or, perhaps more accurately, to be smelled).
Though they flirt with pop structure — always with subtlety, often with a wink — the diaphanous songs on Iris Silver Mist find Hval resisting pop music's alluring invitation to self-insert. She is not an empowering avatar, and these songs can't speak to any universal heartbreak or 9-to-5 drudgery. This is the music of a singular mind belonging to a singular human body that sweats and trembles and stinks and moves. If you close your eyes, you'd swear you could touch it.
The songs on Iris Silver Mist are particularly concerned with our relationship to music's physicality, the ways it shapes public space and communal experience, the tactility of the form — the way it smells, looks, vibrates and feels — tantamount to its sound. On the record's penultimate one-two-punch of "The gift" and "A ballad," Hval sings from the stage, gripping the mic stand among cables and monitors, spilled beer and smoke and kissing couples.
"It's so dumb and so me / To think this means anything / But it must be better / To die in sound / Than to die dead, right?" she sings, asking a question that she knows the answer to.
"When I was a child, music felt extremely corporeal. Everything made me cry or feel pain or ecstasy. Music was light, and it was so clear. Every modulation was another step to the clouds," Hval says. "Arpeggio synths gave me the zoomies, I was so happy. I knew exactly which bits of a song was the best. I remember crying unstoppably to the music video of Kate Bush's 'Cloudbusting.' Music was my very real invisible friend. Since then my relationship with music has constantly changed."
She continues, "The older I get, the less often I feel like music feels real. I think this is unavoidable for me. I know people who never get to this point, they manage to keep parts of their musical innocence, and they are amazing to be around! I think it makes me need other things more, and take breaks from listening to music. But I also think it makes me write more to the point when I make my own music."
That pointed sense of urgency is what carries Iris Silver Mist, a scented fantasia and a reclamation of Hval's life as an artist and performer. It's an attempt to reach the reality of music again, to fuse two opposing worlds that once felt so easily symbiotic.
"I can't separate the two," Hval says of her on-stage and off-stage selves. "I am less my identity if I don't perform."
When I ask if her ongoing multidisciplinary journey has led Hval to her signature scent, she's unsure. What does Hval the performer smell like?
"Iris Silver Mist is one side of me I think, but it's not me. Perhaps it's the scent of my absent artist ghost? I don't have a signature, I'm always testing things," she says. "Since I got more into scent and perfume and ingredients, I am just very adventurous. There are so many facets of nature, and of humans — how can we choose?"