Jenny Hval Blends Scent and Sound on Fascinating Album

Jenny Hval’s latest album, Iris Silver Mist, was conceived by the artist as an olfactory experience. Heavily informed by scent, Hval first got a whiff of the central idea for Iris Silver Mist while touring back in 2022. Named after a fragrance designed by French perfumer Serge Lutens, Hval’s album emits the same cool, layered aura as Lutens’ scent. A phantasmagoric, lilting LP, Iris Silver Mist plays like a perfumed fever dream. 

In her latest work, Hval pushes her long-standing fascination with embodiment (particularly feminine embodiment) and thrusts it into the immaterial realm of smell. Narratively fragmented and thematically elusive, Hval’s album takes on many atmospheric qualities of smell to capture the ineffable. Known for her work surrounding the concept of “the body”—its viscera, its sensations, its politics—Hval steps outside herself into something less concrete for her latest work. 

When asked about the challenges of converting the indelible sensations of smell into music, Hval told us, “For some time, fragrance was just a hobby for me, one that gave me very visceral experiences and ideas, but that I didn’t quite understand how [it] could fit into my work. After all, I have no experience in the field; I have not studied chemistry or botany or even smelled most of the old classics.

“But I was reading a lot about ingredients and perfume composition, for my own entertainment, and realized more and more that I could relate to the experience of a scent through my experience with sound, music composition, and writing. So I did an experiment where I just tried on a perfume in a shop or from a sample before writing,” she continues. “I don’t know exactly how that translated, but it made me get into a routine of writing that I haven’t really had since before the pandemic. I was quite burnt out for a while and didn’t write much.”

Hval says that while writing Iris Silver Mist, she found herself “drawn to scents with certain textures … dry, powdery, earthy”, all appropriately tactile descriptions accompanying a work so intersecting in its conception. Rooted in Hval’s very visceral relationship to scent, the album feels both personal and universal. Personal in Hval’s private memories associated with varying scents, but universal in the inexplicable memory association scent creates for us all. 

According to the singer’s admission, she’s no expert in scent but remains able to translate ephemeral emotional sensations. Smell can inspire in an almost alarmingly specific way. Being that scent and taste are so closely related, we asked Hval if taste, like smell, ever influenced the creative process for Iris Silver Mist.

Hval explains, “Part of the reason I got so obsessed with scent… was that I can smell everything. I have coeliac and need to be on an extremely strict diet when I tour to avoid getting sick, so taste is not something I can engage in freely. There’s always caution for me when putting anything new or exciting in my mouth, and not as much joy as I would like. But scent—I am not allergic to smelling, so I can smell everything, unrestrained. Just like I can listen to all kinds of sounds.”

Describing a sort of sensory rerouting, amplifying one sense (smell) in the near absence of another (taste), Jenny Hval’s work is often just as influenced by absence as it is by presence. “You can’t have one without the other.” Hval tells us, “At least you can’t work with art without both. To be present on stage is to leave certain personal things behind.” 

When creating Iris Silver Mist, Hval worked on an experimental piece of literary nonfiction called Scenemennesket, a blend of memoir, essay, and cultural criticism exploring the oscillating divides between person and performer. Roughly translating to “The Stage Person” in English, Hval said working on Scenemennesket (sadly not yet available in English) and Iris Silver Mist concurrently helped her dig deeper into the central concepts of the LP. They formed a sort of artistic symbiosis by working on the projects simultaneously. 

The Norwegian artist explains, “What made it easier to work on a written text and an album at once was creating a third format; an interdisciplinary concert performance, which my band and I did in 2024. Most of the album was already written by then, but I wanted to see what would happen if we toured it before recording it, and also extended it into scenography and even scent. The performance was called I want to be a machine and was also kind of an essay; a stage essay about performing, recording, and writing music. 

“It was much more political than the album, because it had a lot more spoken text that I didn’t feel like the album called for… if I learned anything from that process, it is that you don’t make any artwork to be the One Final Product That Contains Everything. Just like the aim for an artist is definitely not To Be the One Final Artist That Says Everything and to Everyone. Just like the aim for a human can’t be optimizing your self. An optimized self is no longer a self.”

Hval’s last album, Classic Objects, shares a similar preoccupation with memory as Iris Silver Mist. However, where Iris Silver Mist takes on a more abstract quality, Classic Objects is much more grounded in introspection and an examination of the self. In Classic Objects, Hval looks inward to understand, while in Iris Silver Mist, she looks out. In Iris Silver Mist, Hval treats memory not as mere recollection but as an immersive experience. Classic Objects feels like the singer reminiscing at twilight before the haze of nighttime and dreams descend from Iris Silver Mist. 

In Iris Silver Mist, tracks blur and blend like memories, conflating the line between singular songs and the broader album, almost making one indistinguishable from the other. Just as in the more encompassing project of Iris Silver Mist and Scenemennesket in tandem, the artist’s work couldn’t remain within the confines of a solitary medium.

When asked what informed the project’s nebulous nature, Hval notes, “This was how I wrote the music. When I started writing, I decided to make a mixtape, or a feeling of a late-night radio show, so I wrote all the tracks (and many that are not on the album) in one document, each beginning inside the previous track and ending with a new song coming out. A sonic centipede.” Resisting the siren song of the single, Iris Silver Mist demands to be experienced wholly, its fragmented parts unable to convey the weight of the whole. 

Hval’s music has a very cerebral, almost haunting quality, making it likely unsuitable for a broader commercial audience. Still, fans of the genre will surely appreciate the LP’s experimental approach. While Iris Silver Mist might not be appearing at your summer barbecues and pool parties, it would make for a perfectly moody backing track for an avant-garde film or new-wave gallery exhibition.

Where hooks and catchy choruses typically reside, Hval provides something much more subdued: layered ambiance, spoken-word delivery of lyrics, and a genre-bending collection of songs. Iris Silver Mist subverts the conventions even Hval herself has worked under prior. Vaporous, dispersed, and abstract, Hval’s album almost feels like the fraternal twin to her novel Paradise Rot.

Though originally published in Norwegian nearly a decade prior, Hval’s novel Paradise Rot wasn’t released in English until 2018. An atmospheric, sapphic, and cerebral chronicling of the confounding relationship between a Norwegian student studying in England and her perplexing roommate, Paradise Rot saw something of a renaissance of its own after it was embraced by the then-burgeoning “BookTok” community (TikTok content creators focused on books and reading). Though Paradise Rot assumes a more claustrophobic, deteriorating tone than Iris Silver Mist, both meditate on the porous boundaries between self and environment, perception and meaning, and transformation against obliteration. 

When discussing the marked difference in reception between the novel’s 2009 release in Norway versus its more recent English release, the writer said, “… in Norway it got mostly bad reviews. I was told my music was better. I was told nothing happened. I felt like I was judged by expectations of form. When the English translation came out many years later, I was slightly embarrassed because I wrote it so long ago, but I had also been able to improve it a bit while working with Verso, which was a great experience. The reception was very different. Much less tabloid. It was just a different time and a different, more targeted audience. I ended up really enjoying it, even if I would not have written that book today.”

Like Paradise Rot, Hval’s latest album feels like a visceral experience. While discussing the unique liminal space performance creates, Hval told us, “When I perform, I feel like I’m in-between the living and the dead, and more importantly, that living and dying are twins with equal worth and equal magnetism. They even wear the same scent.”

A haunting summation of the record’s ethos, Hval tests the limits of language and form throughout the album. Her work, musical or otherwise, has historically resided in liminal spaces where the distinction between genre and medium, spoken word and song, fiction and reality dissolve entirely. With Iris Silver Mist, Jenny Hval pulls us into that in-between place to pound at its walls and test its bounds.