Jenny Hval wants you to imagine a stage decorated with cigarette smoke. This is what she sings on her new single "To Be A Rose." "This is every cigarette my mom ever smoked," she intones. It comes from her just-announced album Iris Silver Mist, which is centered on scents.
During the solitude of the pandemic, the Norwegian artist rekindled her affinity for perfumes. She debuted some of the LP tracks last year during performances titled I Want To Be A Machine before they were even recorded; she sang them while surrounded by rice cookers. About the lead single, Hval said:
“To Be A Rose" was written as a restless pop structure. 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.
The tune comes with a music video of footage taken from her tours between 2015 and 2024 and edited by Jenny Merger Myhre, who explained:
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.
Watch below.
TRACKLIST:
01 "Lay Down"
02 "To Be A Rose"
03 "I Want To Start At The Beginning"
04 "All Night Long"
05 "Heiner Muller"
06 "You Died"
07 "Spirit Mist"
08 "I Don’t Know What Free Is"
09 "The Artist Is Absent"
10 "Huffing My Arm"
11 "The Gi"
12 "A Ballad"
13 "I Want The End To Sound Like This"
Iris Silver Mist is out 5/2 via 4AD. Pre-order it here.
