Jenny Hval

Norwegian musician, writer and sound performance artist Jenny Hval was born in Tvedestrand on July 11, 1980. After singing in the group Shellyz Raven in the 1990s, she moved to Australia, where she studied music and graduated from the University of Melbourne. Back in Oslo, she completed her training with literary studies and published articles in the press. Her musical career began under the pseudonym Rockettothesky with the albums To Sing You Apple Trees (2006) and Medea (2008), a blend of pop, folk and electronica. The musician continued her exploration of sound matter under her real name with the albums Viscera (2011), produced by John Parish, and Innocence Is Kinky (2013), released on the Rune Grammofon label, then, in the same experimental register, Apocalypse, Girl (2015), the first released on the Sacred Bones label. She collaborates with composer Kim Myrh and the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra on In the End His Voice Will Be the Sound of Paper (2016), before tackling Blood Bitch (2016), a conceptual opus tinged with cinematic references. In 2019, The Practice of Love is a plunge into trance and ambient, poetry and sound collage, very different from the softly pop and intimate songs of Classic Objects (2022), inaugurating the artist's contract with the 4AD label. In addition to writing novels and other collaborations, Jenny Hval constantly seeks to renew her musical language. In 2025, she named her ninth studio album after a Serge Lutens perfume, Iris Silver Mist, with its equally delicate, evanescent notes.