FEATURE:
Modern Heroines
PHOTO CREDIT: Jenny Berger Myhre
Part Eighty-Seven: Jenny Hval
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ONE of the finest artists in the world…
this Modern Heroines concerns the brilliant Jenny Hval. Although she has released seven solo albums prior to Classic Objects, I want to make her current album the main focus. Iconic and among the most acclaimed songwriters around, Hval is Norwegian singer-songwriter, record producer, musician, and novelist. A stunning artist whose music is absolutely phenomenal. Recorded at Øra Studio in Trondheim, Classic Objects is one of the best-reviewed albums of the year so far. I am going to end with a playlist of her best solo songs to date. Before that, I am going to combine a couple of recent reviews, alongside reviews for the fantastic Classic Objects. In this NPR interview, we discover why (compared to some of her other albums) Classic Objects is a brighter and more Pop-oriented release.:
“All of Hval's albums, in their own way, attempt to untangle the same struggle: the reality that her art, her desires, her body, plagued by history's gaze and capitalism's exploitations, have to be continuously reclaimed. Her latest, Classic Objects, expands on that project with a fluid, lively meditation on what it means to center her identity around being an artist, while grappling with the reality that her art exists tethered to a wider marketplace — one which constantly threatens to erode the personal, radical nature of her work.
A press release for the album claims Classic Objects is Hval's "version of a pop album," but the music here isn't pop so much as it's lighter than her more foreboding past work. Gone is the darkwave of The Practice of Love or the medieval gloom of 2016's Blood Bitch, replaced here with a jazzy, New Age sound. On songs like "Year of Sky" and "Cemetery of Splendour," thunderous bongos and shaken percussion give the songs an earthy, ritualistic aura, the latter ending with a spoken list of oddities found outside — branches, pine cones, cigarette butts — and the sounds of buzzing insects and revving cars and cyclists.
There's also long been a fervent religiosity to Hval's work, from the straight line she draws between her own sensuality and the ecstatic visions of Joan of Arc on 2013's Innocence Is Kinky to the throbbing, church-worthy instrumentals of Apocalypse, girl. Even her lyrics, which tend to unspool in poetic, casually conversational threads, can sometimes sound like sermons. Here, she continues her fascination with chest-clutching, Americana spiritualism on songs like "Year of Love," with its flat, pop Manzarek-style organ, and "American Coffee," which has a soulful choir tracking Hval's wild-out vocals. Once you get to the line where she sings about nursing a UTI and staring back at her own blood in the toilet, you know what it means to be a congregant of Hval's church: to remember that underneath society's projections, you're just flesh and blood.
The brightness of the music on this album reflects the ways in which Hval's more theory-driven tendencies as a songwriter are pulled back a bit. On Classic Objects, Hval's radical politics tend to hang in the background, bobbing in and out of the music's line of vision like deflated balloons that have clustered at the edges of a party in its last hours. The album opens up when Hval latches onto one of them and pulls it close to her, reminding herself that, actually, maybe she isn't as in control as she thought.
Classic Objects vibrates with the tension of "what could have been" had Hval made different life choices. On the album opener "Year of Love," she cheekily surveys the weight of her marriage — an act that arguably threatens her artistic and financial independence — like a museum attendee circling a sculpture. "In the year of love I signed a deal with patriarchy," she sings. But she also fills the album with voices and faces from her personal past — a studio space partner; roommates; her mother, scared in childbirth — revisiting life-shifting details like a scrapbook, cataloging the moments that have informed her art and made her her — more than just an artist, more than just a married person. And yet a shadow version of herself remains, a concept she confronts on "American Coffee": "Not she who stayed behind / She who quit everything, music and identity."
For Hval, music and identity is everything, and often one and the same. And art and what it means to protect it, to keep it an experimental extension and reflection of her selfhood, is a central concern of Classic Objects — sometimes ambiently, sometimes directly. On "Jupiter," she confronts the reality that not all art shares her same revolutionary ideals, looking at her reflection in the designer product-lined windows of the gluttonous installation "Prada Marfa" in the Texas desert. "Sometimes art is more real, more evil," she sings. "Just lonelier." Elsewhere, in the middle of the album's finale, "The Revolution Will Not Be Owned," Hval takes a meta beat to call witness to the political limitations of her own art embedded in the fine print. "This song is regulated by copyright regulations / And dreaming doesn't have copyright," she sings, the song's instrumentals building up around her. "I guess you could say: The revolution will not be owned."
Hanging over every minute of Classic Objects is the reminder that art and self-expression in its most potent form — vulnerable and politically unsparing — is precious, always threatened by the prospect of commercial ruin. Hval's work isn't easily codified, messily pushing and prodding against preconceived ideas about gender, sex, labor and desire, and so it constantly runs the risk of being flattened. And when she excavates her discomfort here with institutions like marriage and easily marketable strains of art, she shines a spotlight on the ways in which capitalist forces reorganize both art and love, threatening to mute their possibilities. Even the last few minutes of "Cemetery of Splendour," in which the trampling steps and trash of humans have invaded a natural terrain, traffic sounds dueling with the buzzing of insects, hold so much tension in such a small invasion”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Jenny Berger Myhre
The Guardian recently spoke with Hval. They opinion how, whereas she has used her music to discuss pornography and patriarchy, Jenny Hval feels like a hypocrite for tying the knot. There were also some perks for Hval when it came to the recent pandemic lockdowns:
“Classic Objects isn’t wholly preoccupied with marriage. Hval’s pandemic experience looms large over much of the record, with the legal restrictions placed on artistic performance providing plenty of food for thought. The fact that live music events were halted gave her the impression that her work was generally considered “dangerous yet unimportant” – the perfect perspective, she says, for “any authoritarian government” wanting to make changes to society.
Even as things open up again, Hval is concerned that the music industry is continuing its slide into a “more conservative” mindset, with the economic toll of multiple lockdowns cementing the shift. In order to guarantee ticket sales, venues that “started out as subcultural hubs” are now “hosting bands that are already signed and touring the world”, she says. The datafication of music also rewards existing success. “I wonder if that trend will just keep going now that we try to measure everything,” says Hval. “There are so many numbers – they can distort good creative decisions.”
Yet lockdown had its perks. Hval felt the physical benefits of pausing her itinerant lifestyle; she has coeliac disease and felt liberated from the constant challenge of finding suitable food while on tour. She also entered a period of cosy domesticity, spending time with her husband, who got very into fermenting food and looking after their puppy – a task that led to the semi-passive consumption of endless trashy movies, the only art form undemanding enough to accommodate the pair’s newly dog‑centric attention spans.
Hval came to the conclusion that she “would be quite happy to be a hermit artist”, but a recent return to live performance reminded her that touring’s sacrifices are accompanied by a unique joy. “There’s some kind of magic about being on stage that I only remember [when I’m there],” she says. “There are some parts of me that only exist in that stage moment.”
Instead of turning her into a permanent recluse, the pandemic, and the change of pace it required, fed into a new approach to songwriting: “simple stories” to echo her experience of a simpler life. The lyrics in Classic Objects are more immediately intelligible than on her previous offerings, but pared-back Hval is still rich and complex. The gorgeously searching, organ-backed American Coffee references everything from Guy Debord and her mother’s fear of driving to watching French cinema while suffering from a brutal UTI. She admits her songs “did get more adventurous than I anticipated”, which, in retrospect, she is relieved about. “Otherwise I think I would have written something that I didn’t actually agree with”.
A truly awesome artist who is going to continue to bring us music of the highest order, Jenny Hval is most definitely an artist who will be looked back on as a legend and iconic artist of our time. She is one of the most astonishing lyricists I have ever heard. Classic Objects is among her best albums to date. DIY had this to say when they reviewed it:
“There was a painter in my first studio space,” Jenny Hval recalls on the title track of ‘Classic Objects’. “I remember she used to attach her own hair to her paintings.” Delivered with a conversational tone that runs throughout this eighth studio album, it holds up a mirror to Jenny’s pairing of the abstract and the personal. Much like the physical incorporation of the painter’s body into their work, ‘Classic Objects’ places personal experience front and centre, yet envelops it in a conceptual bubble. Not new to turning private developments into works of art, here Jenny adopts a new level of candour. Inspired by the lack of artistry during the pandemic, ‘Classic Objects’ is the response to a question asked by many over the past two years: Who am I? The answer lies throughout several personal stories, each recounted with a matter-of-factness at odds with the otherworldly sound. On standout ‘American Coffee’, a tale of global exploration is momentarily replaced by French philosophy, leading to a disarmingly abrupt finish. The album’s two epic set pieces close with natural sounds that directly contradict the tangible nature of the story at hand. ‘Cemetery Of Splendour’ concludes with a spoken list of objects, painting a haunting picture of the balance of the natural world and humanity. It all accompanies a sound that harks at traditionalism and modernity, driven by Jenny’s distinctive soft vocals. Yet what on previous records had created something ethereal and untouchable here generates something altogether more physical and tactile. ‘Classic Objects’ walks the line between art and humanity, between nature and fabrication, between the real and the conceptual. It’s the audible equivalent of a painting affixed with human hair”.
I am going to close with a glowing review from Pitchfork. Not normally ones to give albums acclaim (they tend to err more on the side of caution a lot of the time!), they were impressed by Classic Objects:
“She plunges further into the divide between seeming and being on “Jupiter” and the album’s title track. On the former, she squares herself against the beige concrete corners of the Prada Marfa art installation in the West Texas desert. “I am an ‘abandoned project,’” she sings. The line recalls Lydia Davis’ singular “Tropical Storm,” with Hval offering a lightly funny reminder of the constant upkeep and occasional chaos of the corporeal form. But it also brings to mind the premise that Joan Jacob Brumberg presented in her 1998 book The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls, which examines the historical arc of pervasive messaging to girls about physical self-improvement. Hval further ponders material differences in “Classic Objects,” wondering whether the items in her hands are art or stuff, and how to kiss passive gold and marble.
Within the confines of her humanity, Hval settles into the contradictory realities of her existence—among them, being a proud feminist and independent artistic woman who decided to marry a man. She recoils at being subjected to the “industrial-happiness complex,” as she puts it. “‘It’s just for contractual reasons,’ I explained,” she sings on “Year of Love,” with black jeans offered as another signifier of efforts to defang the proceedings. The song’s jumpy organ melody feels like a feverish calliope, as if the carousel of “The Circle Game” had somehow gone a little lopsided.
Hval’s perspective gradually expands outward across the record, shifting from small personal details to bigger-picture observations. The heady “Year of Sky” spins from the appeal of finding oneself back to losing it again, where time and place are temporary anchors to an infinite expanse, and Hval ponders the afterlife in “Cemetery of Splendour,” with a plodding, earthy bass tone that cedes to a long tail of a woodsy field recording. She takes inventory of her environment in a voice of breathy wonder—leaves, birds, cigarettes, gum! gum! gum!—illustrating her exterior world with lovely and ugly things alike.
From the harp-dappled lilt of “Freedom,” where she wonders about institutional promises, Hval builds toward the stormy, piano-driven finale of “The Revolution Will Not Be Owned.” She basks in the notion that an interior world is the only space where absolute unbridled freedom exists—even songs are subject to copyrights, as she sings. She frames dreaming as “the plan without the plan,” a carnival of unconsciousness. It’s here that the being and the seeming collapse into nothing, where it’s possible to be free of the world and all its impositions. Absolute freedom, Hval suggests, lies in the willful abandon of opening up to the wild possibilities of the interior. In the great conflicting unknown, pleasant surprises, profound revelations, and life-changing love abound”.
One of the music world’s most important and respected artists, I am curious where Jenny Hval will head next. As she is married and her music has taken on a new tone and lyrical direction, this will be a new and exciting phase for her. If you have not discovered Hval and her beautiful music, then spend some time to immerse yourself in the wonder of…
A modern-day icon.