Pop experimentalist Jenny Hval has announced her latest album. Iris Silver Mist is out May 2 via 4AD, and the single "To be a rose" is out now.
Iris Silver Mist is named after a metallic-smelling perfume, and the album was inspired by fragrances during pandemic lockdowns, when Hval became more interested in smells than music due to all live shows being on hold. When performing the songs live last year, Hval even placed rice cookers on the stage to give the music a scent.
Of "To be a rose," Hval said in a statement, "'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."
Watch a video for "To be a rose‚" directed by Jenny Merger Myhre using VHS tour footage captured between 2015 and 2024, below. The album tracklist is below that. Iris Silver Mist is available to preorder here.
Iris Silver Mist:
1. Lay down
2. To be a rose
3. I want to start at the beginning
4. All night long
5. Heiner muller
6. You died
7. Spirit mist
8. I don't know what free is
9. The artist is absent
10. Huffing my arm
11. The gift
12. A ballad
13. I want the end to sound like this