Having signed to 4AD last year, Jenny Hval has now announced that she will release her first album for the label, ‘Classic Objects’, in March.
“In 2020, like everyone else, I was just a private person”, she says of the beginnings of the album. “No artists were allowed to perform. I was reduced to ‘just me’. This made me want to write simple stories. My problem was that I found that the music component in the writing process made the words stray from their path and even jump into the absurd”.
“I think it is just bound to happen when there is music involved”, she adds. ”After all, a song isn’t just words, it has a melody, and the reason we have melodies is to step into the dark and jump off cliffs”.
For new single ‘Year Of Love’, the cliff edge was the memory of seeing a marriage proposal happening in the audience while she was performing a number of years ago.
“For me, this experience was very troubling”, she says. “It confronted me with the fact that I am also married. What does that detail from my private life say about me as an artist? ‘Year Of Love’ asks, who am I as an artist? Do my private actions betray my work and voice?”
‘Classic Objects’ is out on 11 Mar. Listen to ‘Year Of Love’ here: