Album Info

Iris Silver Mist

Alternative - 2025

The Norwegian musician and interdisciplinary artist began unwittingly conceptualizing her ninth album in the solitude of the pandemic, during which... more

Tracklist

1

Lay down

4:16 min
2

To be a rose

3:53 min
3

I want to start at the beginning

2:26 min
4

All night long

6:01 min
5

Heiner Muller

0:59 min
6

You died

3:31 min
7

Spirit mist

1:53 min
8

I don't know what free is

4:46 min
9

The artist is absent

1:23 min
10

Huffing my arm

1:27 min
11

The gift

2:37 min
12

A ballad

3:45 min
13

I want the end to sound like this

5:42 min

About Iris Silver Mist

The Norwegian musician and interdisciplinary artist began unwittingly conceptualizing her ninth album in the solitude of the pandemic, during which she developed a newfound passion for perfume. It was later that Hval gathered that her scent obsession was an answer to that era’s void of intimacy and physicality. This explains the intriguingly lush title, borrowed from a scent of the same name from French perfumer Serge Lutens described as smelling somewhere between cold steel and morning mist. It also explains the record’s ghostly sensuality, rife with sights, smells, and sounds which Hval conjures in their absence—the incandescent buzz of stage lights and scent of spilled beer in rock clubs now shuttered. (“A stage without a show/A hazy silhouette/Around an empty space,” she sings over moody trip-hop on “The artist is absent.”) Here, scent is a portal to another time and place: On “To be a rose,” the smell of cigarettes transports her to her childhood, her mother smoking on the balcony: “Long inhales and long exhales/Performed in choreography/Over our dead-end town.”