The Predatory Wasp
Jenny Hval opens her new album Iris Silver Mist with Lay Down, a track that floats in slowly, all soft synths and whispered intimacy. She sings about lying in the dark with a scythe in her hand, which sounds ominous, but lands more reflective than threatening. There’s a quiet jazziness to the arrangement, loungey and fluid, making it feel like something half-heard through a hotel wall.
Jenny Hval and Håvard Volden’s Lost Girls’ collaboration dates back more than a decade, with Volden playing regularly in Hval’s live band and two previous albums. In 2022, the duo were booked to perform a concert at Les Subsistances in Lyon, and decided to use the opportunity to create all new material, with Volden creating beats and guitar chord progressions and Hval restructuring the parts, creating melodies and adding lyrics. The resulting album, Selvutsletter, explores different territory than their previous work; shorter, more concise and melodic songs that border on alternative pop (kinda), with opener Timed Intervals one of the clear standouts.
Taken from her new album Classic Objects, Year of Sky is as evocative and transportive as anything Jenny Hval has created, soundtracking a rite of passage into a world only she can perceive but that she’s desperate to share with us.
Year Of Love is the second single to be released from Jenny Hval’s forthcoming album Classic Objects – her first studio album for 4AD. The song explores a “very troubling” experience she had of witnessing a marriage proposal at one of her performances. Plenty of artists, I’m sure, would have experienced this as a purely romantic act, and thought very little about it afterwards, but for Hval it elicited questions about how her art impacts others, and her own marriage; themes she explores and attempts to resolve over the course of the song.
Of course, you could just ignore all that and enjoy what is – lyrics aside – one of the most upbeat songs in her catalogue to date.
The Predatory Wasp 