Norwegian musician, artist and novelist Jenny Hval announces her new album, Iris Silver Mist, out on 2 May, the lead single/video ‘To be a rose’, and a UK/EU tour. Iris Silver Mist is named after a fragrance made by the nose Maurice Roucel for the French perfume house Serge Lutens. It’s 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.

Rather than begin with music, Iris Silver Mist began with the absence of it. As the pandemic led to no live music, the smell of cigarettes, soap, and the sweat from warm stage lights and shared bathrooms was replaced by unphysical, algorithmic listening at home. Suddenly, and for the first time since she was a teenager, Hval found herself growing interested in perfumes. Smelling, reading, collecting, writing—she immersed herself with scent while her music was put on hold. It took her a year to understand what was happening, until she did: she was seeking another way of sensing physical intimacy. Where music had turned into a void, she filled it with fragrance.

Iris Silver Mist is very sensual, tactile and intimate—touching you as smells, sounds, and images do when they multiply. During a series of performances last year titled I want to be a Machine, Hval performed many of the tracks on Iris Silver Mist for the first time, before they’d been recorded, and surrounded by rice cookers, filling the songs with the misty smell of rice. Starting the album with a performance was quite an unusual approach—and it was also an intimate one. Emphasising the importance of the physical and live elements of music, these songs held the experience that was lacking in Hval’s life for so long.

Throughout Iris Silver Mist, perfume continues to turn into smoke, mist, and music. On lead single, ‘To be a rose’, Hval half-speaks, half-sings to the beat of a drum machine: “A rose is a rose is a rose is a cigarette." Roses and cigarettes are romantic forms of wishful thinking, transporting you someplace else. Of the track, Hval says: “’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.”