Iris Silver Mist is the new album by Norwegian musician, writer and artist Jenny Hval. Named after the fragrance by Serge Lutens with the same name, the album too moves like a perfume—between flower and smoke, ghostly yet alive.

The album didn’t start with music, but with its absence. When live music disappeared during the pandemic, Jenny Hval was left with a void that was hard to pinpoint until she found herself drawn to perfume. Smelling and collecting, reading and writing: she put away the music, and surrounded herself with the notes and accords of fragrances instead. It was only later that she understood why: she was searching for another way to sense presence, to fill the emptiness music had left behind. When she eventually returned to making music, each song was infused with smells.

On the album’s first single, ‘To Be a Rose’, Jenny’s words linger somewhere between speech and song. “A rose is a rose is a rose is a cigarette” she sings, speaks, to the beat of a drum machine. The

rose grows taller with each chorus as the chords change, to the rhythm of the smoke from her mother’s cigarette dancing through the air. Smoke and flowers intertwine throughout the album, so does the parallel between Jenny and her mother. “I was singing in my room, she smoked on the balcony/Long inhales and long exhales performed in choreography.”

Many of the songs on Iris Silver Mist were created as a mixtape, as one continuous flow of ideas. Before the songs were recorded, they were performed like this, as long, shapeshifting pieces, as part of the interdisciplinary piece I want to be a Machine. The album has kept this feeling of one song seeping into the next. Field recordings blur the line between music and the world around it, too. In ‘Heiner Müller’, we hear the sound of the artist singing to herself while walking her dog in the rain. ‘Spirit Mist’ includes the hum of the Oslo subway. “It is about moving,” Jenny says about the album, but she means it in a more symbiotic way. Moving into the sound, as one song turns into the next, as she turns into the music, and her perfume does so, too.

Iris Silver Mist is a record about the stage, the music and how it can change us. About the things that touch us, change us, and settle on or under our skin.