Iris Silver Mist carries Jenny Hval's fragmented memories

This relationship is anatomical, due to proximity of certain neurons, but it’s also poetic; scent can be transportive, drawing up from a well something forgotten, inaccessible by logic or intention.

The parfumier that produces Iris Silver Mist describes it in the following notes: clove, carrot seeds, green, iris, floral, vetiver, amber, musk. What does green smell like? What does it sound like? With this sensory framing, Jenny Hval’s new album Iris Silver Mist is transformed into a multidimensional experience, enveloping the listener in not only sound but scent.

Hval wrote much of this record during the pandemic, after a period in which she had become interested in perfume as a substitute for music, something that fills space with meaning and communicates without words. Much of the album was performed for the first time in Hval’s avant-garde theater piece I want to be a Machine, in which she played the songs surrounded by rice cookers, bringing audiences into a shared sensory space of sight, smell, and sound, collapsing the distance between their experiences as much as possible. Iris Silver Mist carries that spirit; listeners feel a particular intimacy with Hval, as she shares fragmented memories from her childhood (“I want to start at the beginning”).

Hval mixes senses throughout the record: “I open my mouth / Sing to the light / Pick the darkest vowel / ‘A’ for ‘alright.’” She turns an observational tone towards boundaries and sees them dissolve. Hval also seems to explore her identity as an artist and performer more consciously on Iris Silver Mist, using her delicate style to narrate scenes of bars, greenrooms, and stages, dark and gritty places contrasted by her clear, pure voice.

But Iris Silver Mist is said to smell like steel, metallic and hard. The clarity heard on this album can be interpreted as a sharpened edge in Hval. She collapses the space of the album into a single sensory experience; she conveys something unsearchable but found.