Jenny Hval’s catalog is like an art-pop field guide to interiority. On a dozen releases this decade, the Norwegian artist’s work has collaged edges of literature, film, and visual art to subtly critique sex, politics, and the status quo with both seriousness and wit. At 39, she is a post-punk pop philosopher at the height of her craft: Hval’s last album, 2016’s Blood Bitch, was a deep inquiry into vampire movies and period blood, the feminine and the grotesque. It won the prestigious Nordic Music Prize, and contained Hval’s apex, the cloudlike “Conceptual Romance.” That gliding song treated infatuation and obsession as intellectual queries, and it serves as a bridge to her sublime new record, The Practice of Love.
Speaking over the phone from Oslo, Hval tells me she aimed to move toward “an embrace of the euphoria of pop music” with The Practice of Love, and her beats and poetry have never glittered so totally as on the record’s first single, “Ashes to Ashes.” None of her heady brilliance is lost among the club-adjacent throbs, as the album probes questions of motherhood, creation, otherness, and how a human can be. Working with an international crew of guest vocalists—Vivian Wang of the Singaporean psych rock band the Observatory, Australian singer-songwriter Laura Jean Englert, and French experimentalist Félicia Atkinson—Hval creates, at times, a chorus of speaking, singing, thinking, and conversing, the life of the active mind happening in real time.
The Practice of Love finds Hval moving into a new role as her own main producer, while also redefining what “production” can mean. Though she continued working with Norwegian noise artist and frequent production partner Lasse Marhaug in the studio, Hval found that her language itself guided the music’s structures and sounds this time. “I felt like I’d already produced the album by writing the lyrics and doing the demo versions,” she explains. “It felt like they were done.” She calls this approach “a revelation,” and her ecstatic psychic energy courses through the entire record. Hardly pausing, Hval reflected on the literature, technology, refuse, and personal highs that informed The Practice of Love, the work of a genius in stride.
Poet and musician Ingrid Chavez
Jenny Hval: Ingrid Chavez worked with Prince in the late ’80s and early ’90s doing very well-placed spoken word over beats. It’s beautiful. She released an album called May 19, 1992 on Paisley Park Records. She also wrote, in part, Madonna’s “Justify My Love,” which she didn’t get credit for, because Lenny Kravitz took it. But that song was very much her style. It’s so nice to hear something so sensual and down-to-Earth with this aesthetic. This was very much in my ears as I was starting to write this album. I get obsessed with how much meaning can be placed in just one word or phrase, especially with a dance-y beat.
Simply Nailogical’s “#POLISHMOUNTAIN” viral video
When I’m at the end of things, and when I get frightened, I tend to go into YouTube rabbit holes, maybe to distract myself, maybe to find friends. I randomly started watching a lot of makeup videos. I’ve never known anything about nail polish, I’ve never been interested. I’ve not been the kind of person to have spent a lot of time on looks. But after the Apocalypse, girl tour, when I was wearing a wig onstage and playing a character, in a way, I reconnected with things that I didn’t allow myself to like when I was a teenager because I thought they were “girly.”
This video is just an insane use of something that is almost never seen as grotesque. It’s just destruction: This stairway to heaven through polishing your nails higher and higher, meeting God through tall nails. It’s like growing the dead part of your body.
Juliana Spahr’s 2015 poem “Tradition”
I’ve read several of Juliana Spahr’s books, and they’ve stayed with me for years. She writes about environmental issues in this way that also has to do with motherhood, and the act of giving and passing on, which is the “tradition” in this poem—how everything is connected. The narrator is breastfeeding chemicals, because that’s what our world is made of, you know? For me, the poem has all the music of the world inside it. I could not put this poem down. I felt like I was reading it every day. I’ve been very inspired by the way she cares.
The book that this poem is taken from, That Winter the Wolf Came, is also very much about politics and protest. Being here in Norway, it’s not quite the same as the extreme political situation that America has. We’ve never really had the Occupy movement and we’ve never really had a Trump yet. My situation can’t compare, and I can only try to grow empathy from reading.
Writer Kathy Acker
On this album, there are hints of memories of an origin story of writing: going back to what makes it possible, or what enables a voice. Kathy Acker is one of the voices that made me able to write.
I revisited this feeling when I recently read her book letters with McKenzie Wark, I’m Very Into You. But the first book of hers I read, at university, was Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream, and I found it incredible that she could use already-existing texts as a weapon to destroy literature with literature. It was liberating to read her books when I was in my early 20s, looking for something that would rupture what made me so sad about most canonized literature, which was this idea of the dramatic arc. Kathy Acker was saying: Not everything and everyone can be explained with a classic story arc. This other type of writing voice can illustrate human thinking, experience, stories. She was very inspired by a lot of literary movements, so it’s very considered, but it’s so explosive and so emotionally concise. I thought, If this is literature, then I feel at home in literature. It was my punk, basically.
The Practice of Love collaborator Vivian Wang’s voice
I remember the first time I heard Vivian read—it was a narration I wrote for a film about an occult part of Norway—and I really liked it. It just felt like I was hearing music, or I was hearing myself. She has an amazing, deep tone, and her accent is fascinating because it’s impossible to place, like Werner Herzog. But the main quality of her voice is how she cares for each word. Words read with care are very affecting.
Sometimes you hear a voice and you feel like you’re related to that person through how they sound, and there is a tone we create when we talk to people that we feel like we have a mutual understanding with. I wanted to create music that would try to convey this understanding. There is something in me that wants the voice to be immortal, so it can remove itself from the body and belong in some dimension with other voices, where it can live. It’s a little utopian, and it’s the opposite of the internet, where we have no voices in sound, and we just shout at each other in a hundred-and-whatever-it-is letters. I really wanted to write about trying to be a little more in the ether, and less in the pounding keypad that you shout with on social media.
Porn magazines in forests
These childhood memories of great complexity kept coming up as I was writing. I remembered finding some almost rotting magazines on a bike trip when I was very young. They had been lying in the forest: communal underground kids’ stuff. This was before the internet; we didn’t really see porn until we were older. I’d maybe seen some at a friend’s house and found it really scary. I’ve spoken with many people who’ve had similar experiences of knowing where something was hidden that was communal.
This idea popped up in one of the lyrics: that the forest is a magical place where you can find all kinds of dirt. And “magical” is not necessarily a positive thing. I wanted to create a place on this album that might be your own graveyard, but it might be a magical forest wonderland, an imaginary New Mexico landscape, a place where you could exist at the same time as Georgia O’Keeffe. I recently got to visit the library in Santa Fe and see her collection of books. I was really high on coffee and almost crying when I saw all of it.
Tim Wendelboe coffee
There are some aspects of recording that have nothing to do with anything creative. My last three albums have been powered by Wendelboe coffee; I record one block away from their store in Oslo. It’s really famous, which can be annoying, because it’s full of coffee tourists. I’ve been high so many times in that place—from coffee. It’s my only high. I don’t really drink and I’ve never taken drugs. Coffee is my highest level. The coffee is not for everyone—it’s Scandinavian style, light roast, so it’s stronger—but I think it’s the best in the world. There’s great coffee in America, too, though a lot of the time I find there’s a lot of really dark stuff in America—but that’s America, in general.
Dried figs
Some fruits, like figs, are just very metaphorical, so I put it in a lyric [on “Accident”: “She eats dried figs from a container”]—a dried and old vagina with no purpose. The dried fig is an interesting sight of a resistance to norms, and it holds many different ways of being. It’s maybe something I put in as a joke, but in the same song, I tried to look at: What are you? If you were made for other things [reproduction], then it’s an opportunity to rethink what you are instead.
Everyone my age is asked, inappropriately, “Don’t you have?” or “Shouldn’t you have?” The first time someone asked me, it was really shocking. The person didn’t know me at all. The way we talk about reproduction is very limited to whether you “should” or not, like it’s a choice, and there is no larger conversation. But this was not my dream, so why do I feel like I’m pressured into thinking about it? There is a lot of stigma with being without child. It’s like ancient shame. The dried fig is certainly the old witch.
Regardless of what makes you different—whether it is having a child or not, or being heterosexual or not—seen from this hierarchic perspective, you have lesser value. If you listen to this voice that sees the human story as passing on the human race, then you are a side character. Maybe to accept that position is also to accept that you have an incredible opportunity to be a whole separate story, using your life in ways that mainstream society could not ever think of. That’s what I want for the dried fig metaphor of the unused or disused, whatever society wants to call it, reproductive organs: To think of it as productive instead of reproductive, whether you have kids or not. To just look at the potential.
Computer screen grabs
I work with this choreographer who works with screen grabs a lot: She will make films of things happening in a Word document. I was very inspired by that. I started doing a lot of screen grab videos, and it was quite influential in making words and lyric writing into a production tool. I could then look at the tempo of how I write and find words. I’m trying to implement this musicality of writing into our live performances. It was a new way to connect to myself as a writer, and I needed that because for many years I didn’t write at all. I was finally taking the time to write a book, and at the same time I was wanting to write more in other forms, which became the writing for this album. It was a nice way to realize that words can be as big a part of music as you want them to be.
Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s graphic novel Lost Girls
This book revisits several characters from very famous children’s books as adults—Wendy in Peter Pan, Dorothy of The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland—and puts them in a hotel before the First World War, creating this sexual reawakening narrative. It’s incredibly erotic—a very graphic graphic novel, you could say.
Lost Girls shows how these stories could be seen as fantasies of young girls, and [writer] Alan Moore puts in sexual fantasy scenes based on interpretations of those books. He does something that is, to me, really important and very contemporary, which is to [emphasize] the importance of fantasy and the importance of imagination, and how sexual repression and the creation of taboos makes for a very repressed society, and creates a lot of violence. There are so many adventurous sex scenes, and then on the outside, there are lots of repressed soldiers on their way to war. I was very moved by his willingness to go into the dangers of the repression of imagination.
It’s been criticized for various reasons, and seen as controversial, but I think Lost Girls is beautiful. When I talk about Alice in “High Alice,” that is the Alice I talk about.
That was automatic, and I found it a bit euphoric. The chorus of the first song I released as a solo artist, 13 years ago, was basically about how sex could never be as good as art. [laughs] I mention that because there’s a larger context in this song. “We all want something better” is a bit about what music can do, this feeling of wanting to belong, wanting to speak, wanting to be received. It’s me trying to engage with the feeling in the music, about artistic ecstasy. It relates to imagination in that way—how creating things can make you go into a better place. We all want something better.
