Album of the Week: Jenny Hval's "The Practice of Love"

By Chuyi Wang

I have a theory: if you’re a chamber-pop-producing woman whose name starts with the letter J, you are exponentially more likely to make all-time classic records. Case study: Joanna Newsom. Impossibly good harp-player, breath-taking lyricist, and all-round fucking legend. Case study two: Julia Holter. Ethereal, otherworldly, unspeakably amazing. Case study three: Norwegian experimentalist Jenny Hval, the artist behind our album of the week and who I’m convinced is the most underrated pop artist working today.

After a brief flirtation with the sounds of black metal on her 2016 full-length Blood Bitch, a sonic palette she owed to her heritage and background, Hval eschews the washed out blast beats and dripping synth pads that have characterised her work for the better part of a decade, and instead dishes up an album full of delicious beat-based grooves, managing to fall somewhere not far from Berlin dub techno. This change was neither expected nor heralded by her more recent EP The Long Sleep, which makes it all the more delightful and bouncy - a kind of air that displaces the gothic darkness which has long shadowed both her output. On The Practice of Love, once again from eclectic American label Sacred Bones, Hval channels this newfound cloudy spirit into some of the most thematically liberating lyrics in her discography, invoking the vivid earthiness of a lush forest landscape whilst abandoning the corporeal viscera of the past.

Opening track ‘Lions’, featuring a duet with The Observatory’s Vivian Wang, conjures an almost pagan obsession with the experience of nature; “Study the ground / The brown porous topsoil” Wang directs the listener, while Hval has some sort of psycho-sexual awakening in the background: “Lying all over the place / I am blossoming”. It’s all fairly transportive until the minute-thirty mark, when a shuffling drum sample invades the atmosphere and gives you no choice but to dance your little heart out. As embarrassing as the cliche is, it’s a breath of fresh air. That’s not to say Hval has altogether abandoned the sensual physicality of her words - long time fans need not fret! Her music is just as fiercely and unabashedly intimate as ever, with lead single ‘High Alice’ somehow striking a Goldilocks balance between the sweeping Irigaray-esque imagery of her new project and the fearless femininity of records long past. A mid-song spoken word break swirls these two thematic pools seamlessly: “The ocean / Where I wrote my first poem / With my hand on my skin / With my hand between my thighs”.

Not content to settle with transforming her entire artistic direction just once on a single record, Hval tries her hand and succeeds at upbeat synthpop with album highlight ‘Ashes to Ashes’; her persona espouses an almost sarcastically carefree attitude that is as thrilling as it is intoxicating. Noodling her way across dense synth arpeggios and a thick cloud of horns and strings, Hval delivers some of her finest one-liners to date: “I had a dream about this song that I had not written yet / like I used to dream of fucking before I knew how”. Finally, album closers ‘Six Red Cannas’ and ‘Ordinary’ crank up the dreamy production to atmospheric heights, the former counterpointing Hval’s ethereal vocal textures with a dramatically sweeping phaser, and the latter combining a skeletal house beat with endlessly layering vocal loops like the best modern Björk song never made.

The power in Jenny Hval’s music is not in its immediate catchiness or its all-round accessibility, but in the way its musical acrobatics manage to stick to you and never get old. Although the boundary-pushing nature of both her production and her lyricism never reaches the in-your-face gaudiness of other experimentalists, the impact of her revolution comes long after an initial spin. ‘Other-worldly’ is often a phrase attached to music in the dream-pop or chamber-pop categories, although most times it’s far from the truth. I’m convinced, however, that Jenny Hval is either an angel or an alien.