Jenny Hval on perfume passion and new album Iris Silver Mist

The Skinny: The concept of fragrance is integral to Iris Silver Mist, informing its composition and some of its most resonant images. What sparked your interest in perfumes? How did the influence manifest during the development of the album?
Jenny Hval: I got into fragrance after the pandemic lockdowns, while the world was coming back to life. I didn’t think about it much at the time, I was just completely obsessed with smelling things after a band member took me to a niche perfume shop in Stockholm while we were on tour. I felt very embarrassed for a while – I couldn’t write music but was constantly reading about perfume, ingredients, perfumers, and press materials for old perfumes.

When I was a teenager I was very interested in perfume, but I never understood why – I just was. I think the 40-something me needed to come back to having a sensual experience that felt fresh and real. Smelling perfume is a very physical experience. That’s why people yell at each other on the bus for wearing “too much perfume” or “you smell disgusting”. Smells of other people bother us. I love that.

After smelling a ton of materials and perfumes over many months, I found that it was a good ritual for writing again. I wrote a bunch of demos while testing different rose perfumes – in that period I wrote To be a rose. Originally a lot of the songs were named after perfumes.

I don’t think I will do that again, as I’ve now become such a scent nerd and don’t find everything so surprising and physical… but it was a good way of rediscovering my senses, and challenge my ideas of sound. I have added another facet to my work that I didn’t think I’d find.

The album is an immersive, sensuous experience – how can the listener best recreate the circumstances to enjoy the album to its fullest?
It’s not as much about recreating something essential as finding your own way of listening… it shouldn’t be a lot of work to let music grab you. You just wait for the right moment (when you’re weary, when you’re feeling small, when tears are in your eyes etc). Or listen on a plane.

If you want to be fancy, go to a perfume shop and try something you’d never normally try, and then listen. It COULD of course be an iris perfume… but it could also be something else.

What informed the choice of rice cookers at last year's performances? Are there any plans for similar performances in the future?
I think the rice cookers was the best scenography idea I’ve ever had, it just popped into my head. I love the smell of different types of rice, and I love the composition of cooking it – it gradually begins to simmer and disperse scent. Slowly noticing how rice is steaming gives me a feeling of being warm, clean and safe. We added some oils in the rice cookers as well, made it a little bit alien. I imagined it to be like a drone composition, something Sarah Davachi could have made. FYI: rice has been trending in perfumes, so I guess I’m not the only one enjoying that smell.

We have no plans for more performances with these kinds of elements, but you never know. Right now I just want to be with people, as close as I can get, and with few distractions.

You've used interesting and original visuals in performance; I recall the aerobics on the Blood Bitch tour, and the hyperreal dreamscapes and 'dog in a forest' videos on the Classic Objects tour. Your lyrics have a literary bent and you've written novels. Now there's the influence of fragrance. What is the interplay between these different disciplines as they relate to your music, and how do you refine these influences so as not to overwhelm?
I am always overwhelmed. I think maybe I need to be overwhelmed to start writing. Then I need to lessen the burden a bit and look up. I don’t think I’m that unique, I think a lot of people have interdisciplinary minds. It’s just that I’ve been able to use a variety of facets in my work. Music performance is an opportunity to collaborate with people from other art fields, it’s a social arena. And the writing part was always there for me. As a child I was writing mini novels long before I played instruments.

Images of death pervade the album. There are also recurring references to ash, smoke and burning which brings to mind a sense of ritual, cleansing and renewal. Were these considerations on your mind when you came to write the album, or did the themes only become explicit during the writing process?
Yes. I think as I’m getting older I need to get closer to death also in my music. Music is a place to step closer to death I think, it’s a liminal space. People around me are also getting older, and I spend more time worrying about them. Part of the focus on ritual also comes from this wish to reignite the feeling of music being physical. Post-pandemic and post-streaming era, and after much (most?) music journalism has been cut from the media, it’s sometimes impossible to think of music as sound coming from real human bodies, in a room with real listeners. Real work, real time, real cost.

As well as the melding and evoking of different senses, the album also seeks to dissolve borders in the song to song flow, and many of the lyrics consider the way we can disappear into our physical or mental surroundings. Do you view this as a positive in forging a connection with the world around us or is there a fear/risk of losing a part of our self/individuality in pursuing such a holistic approach?
I think at the time of writing it was very much a negative, self-losing agenda for me. I was writing a lot of those songs for [my stage] show I want to be a Machine, which was very much about the death of art and meaning. But then my optimist self came into the picture… the song The artist is absent flows into a very wishy-washy ghost-soundscape and then goes directly into another track: The gift. Which is about how music is a gift. Even if no-one hears it or wants it. There is a lot of hope there. You could say I’m celebrating the fact that when you die you finally nurture the earth.

The stage is another recurring presence – what is the significance in the context of this album?
I also wrote a book called Scenemennesket (The human on stage) parallel to the show I mentioned earlier. It’s an essay about my experiences with the stage, being on it, looking at it, working with it and its documents, thinking about it. The book is as ghostly as the album, but it goes further into exploring what a human body (and my specific human body) becomes on stage. I wrote one final song for the album very late in the process – A ballad – that’s based on the beginning and end of the book.

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Iris Silver Mist is released on 5 May via 4AD

jennyhval.com