Description
For many artists, self-consciousness is almost an enemy: a barrier against free-flowing inspiration, a choke point for creativity. But the prolific Norwegian artist Jenny Hval — a singer, songwriter, musician, producer, poet, video director and novelist — treats self-consciousness as a constant, even welcome companion.
Hval’s songs continually question and deconstruct themselves, both in lyrics and music. She juggles reminiscence, fantasy, sociopolitical analysis and philosophical reflections as easily as she wanders in and out of pop structures, Minimalist drones and ambient assemblages.
Recording in the solitude of quarantine, she wrote in a statement, “made me want to write simple stories.” But as with Hval’s other work, they didn’t stay simple. “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,” she wrote.
“Year of Love” opens the album with what could have been a breezy pop song; it quickly shifts to cerebral instead. Triangle and guitar set up a light tropical syncopation, but Hval’s melody is in a minor key, and after a potentially romantic opening line — “We got married on a rainy day” — she turns instead to larger societal considerations: “In the year of love I signed a deal with patriarchy.”
