• News

• All

Feb 26, 2025 By Mark Redfern Photography by Jenny Berger Myhre

Jenny Hval has announced a new album, Iris Silver Mist, and shared its first single, “To be a rose,” via a music video. Iris Silver Mist is due out May 2 via 4AD. Below, check out the new song, the album details, and Hval’s upcoming tour dates.

Iris Silver Mist follows 2022’s Classic Objects and 2019’s The Practice of Love. Its album title is named after a perfume made by Maurice Roucel for the French perfume house Serge Lutens. A press release says the perfume is “described as smelling more like steel than silver. It is cold and prickly, soft and shimmering, like stepping outside on an early, misty morning, your body still warm from sleep. A perfume, with its heart notes and scented accords, shares its language with music. Both travel through air, simultaneously invisible and distinct.” During the pandemic Hval rediscovered a love of perfume for the first time since she was a teenager and that influenced the album.

Of the new single, Hval had this to say in the press release: “‘To be a rose’ was written as a restless pop structure. It has a chorus, with chords and a melody, but each chorus sounds slightly different, like we are experiencing the melody from different seasons, decades or even different bodies. The clichéd rose metaphor in the song is equally restless. It can change shape into a cigarette, and then evaporate to smoke. My mother and I (two restless humans) are both present in the song: ‘I was singing in my room, she smoked on the balcony/Long inhales and long exhales performed in choreography.’ If about anything, ‘To be a rose’ is about how one thing becomes another thing, how we all come from somewhere and someone, and how this is stranger and more powerful than we think.”

The song’s video is made up of footage shot in various Hval tours from 2015 to 2024 and edited together by Jenny Merger Myhre, who did the visuals on the 2015 tour and had this to say: “Often we performed on stages or in places that had no screen, or even no projector. As a result, what I filmed would often not be visible for the audience, and so the act of filming became the performance. Using an old VHS-C-camera, I would film parts of the shows as a ritual of seeing and being seen. When we did have a screen, the camera was directly outputting to the video projector, and I loved the moment of going from ‘live footage’ to rewinding into backstage moments, preparations, and previous shows, allowing time travel to happen in real time.”

In 2021 Hval released an album with Håvard Volden under their Lost Girls moniker titled Menneskekollektivet. A second Lost Girls album, Selvutsletter, came out in 2023.

Check out our 2021 interview with Lost Girls on Menneskekollektivet.

Check out our “Why Not Both” Podcast interview with Hval.

Iris Silver Mist Tracklist:

1. Lay down
2. To be a rose
3. I want to start at the beginning
4. All night long
5. Heiner muller
6. You died
7. Spirit mist
8. I don’t know what free is
9. The artist is absent
10. Huffing my arm
11. The gift
12. A ballad
13. I want the end to sound like this

Jenny Hval UK and EU Tour Dates:

Sat. April 5 - Madrid, ES @ Electrónica en Abril
Wed. May 21- London, UK @ Islington Assembly Hall *
Fri. May 23 - Brussels, BE @ Le Nuits Botanique
Tue. May 27 - Berlin, DE @ Silent Green (Betonhalle) *
Fri. May 30 - Amsterdam, NL @ Muziekgebouw
Thu. June 5 - Oslo, NO @ Parkteatret *

* w/ Thea Grant

Subscribe to Under the Radar’s print magazine.

Support Under the Radar on Patreon.