Norwegian multidisciplinary artist Jenny Hval announces her new album, The Practice of Love, due September 13th via Sacred Bones. In conjunction with the album’s announcement, she presents the album’s lead single, “Ashes To Ashes.”
Though the title, The Practice of Love, was in some sense inspired by Valie Export’s 1985 film of the same name.
“This all sounds very clichéd, like a standard greeting card expression“, Hval says, “But for me love, and the practice of love, has been deeply tied to the feeling of otherness. Love as a theme in art has been the domain of the canonized, big artists, and I have always seen myself as a minor character, a voice that speaks of other things. But in the last few years I have wanted to take a closer look at the practice of otherness, this fragile performance, and how it can express love, intimacy, empathy and desire. I have wanted to ask bigger, wider, kind of idiotic questions like: What is our job as a member of the human race? Do we have to accept this job, and if we don’t, does the pressure to be normal ever stop?”
Listen to “Ashes To Ashes” below.
“The Practice of Love unspools with an almost deceptive ease following the horror and viscera of her previous album. Where 2016’s Blood Bitch lingered in disorienting textures, samples and details, The Practice of Love sees the world from above and creates a landscape both realistic and imaginary” – states the press release. Through this landscape, multiple voices engage and disperse, both Hval’s own voice and the voices of collaborators Vivian Wang, Laura Jean Englert, and Félicia Atkinson.
Hval explains that this braid-work of voices could be “the voice of someone who was once an angry teenager, furious at the hierarchies,many years later. No longer angry, but still feeling apart from the mainstream. . . longing for community. I wanted to give the feeling of being apart from the world a mystical, but beautiful place, meaning pop songs… A place that also contains enough depth to bury oneself in.”
The Practice of Love tracklist and artwork:
1. Lions (feat. Vivian Wang)
2. High Alice
3. Accident (feat. Laura Jean)
4. The Practice of Love (feat. Laura Jean and Vivian Wang)
5. Ashes To Ashes
6. Thumbsucker (feat. Félicia Atkinson and Laura Jean)
7. Six Red Cannas (feat. Vivian Wang, Félicia Atkinson and Laura Jean)
8. Ordinary (feat. Vivian Wang and Félicia Atkinson)
Practice of Love Performances:
Fri. Sept. 20 – Sat. Sept. 21 – Oslo, NO @ Ultimate Oslo Contemporary Music Festival
Fri. Sept. 20 – Sat. Sept. 21 – Oslo, NO @ Black Box teater
Sun. Sept. 29 – London, UK @ Milton Court
Tue. Oct. 15 – Frankfurt, DE @ Mousonturm
Wed. Oct. 16 – Frankfurt, DE @ Mousonturm
Wed. Oct. 30 – Paris, FR @ Centre Pompidou
Sat. Nov. 9 – Utrecht, NL @ Le Guess Who? Festival