If you’re trying to build something big, the pipe organ will excavate the space for you. Indie-rock bands begging for gravitas, mystics christening avant-garde civic architecture, conceptual geniuses following the fractals of human depravity and the xenophobic state—they’ve all used the rafter-rattling boom of the pipe organ as a way to construct vastness; if cathedrals didn’t already exist, the flying buttresses of the pipe organ’s groans would have called them into being. In other words, it’s an instrument designed to make a human being, with all of our inner depths, seem very small indeed. You pluck the lyre; God rumbles the pipes.
Over the past decade, Swedish composer and organist Anna von Hausswolff has fashioned her instrument’s blasts of air into cavernous spaces that drip with oversized exhalations. With Iconoclasts, she not only shapes the kind of terrible majesty she created with her mostly instrumental 2020 record All Thoughts Fly, she sings to fill it with heartache, longing, rupture, pain, love—normal, human-sized things whose personal stakes she builds to appropriately towering proportions. With sky-high production to accommodate her songs’ unabashed maximalism, Iconoclasts feels like a triumphant requiem for dead relationships and the carapaces of old selves. “I’ll tell you the whole truth,” she sings in standout “The Whole Woman,” a duet with Iggy Pop. “And you will see me as the woman that I am.”
As the title suggests, many of Iconoclasts’ songs concern themselves with the destruction of idols, whether former lovers, beliefs, or aesthetic principles. Accordingly, the album vibrates with the energy of the recently liberated, even if at times you might mistake it for the shivering of heartache. After saxophonist Otis Sandsjö scribbles heart-shaped patterns over the gothic-jazz overture “The Beast,” von Hausswolff lays out the record’s thesis. “I fought so much for you, for us, our life here,” she sings with the poise of someone who’s taken a deep breath and counted to three. “But now you need to go.” The ensemble bursts into flame, dense organ and clashing cymbals underscoring her dismissal. Across the album, her vocals are buoyant like a bruise, deep purple tones and half-formed blues rising as if from tender skin.
Much of what makes the album work is the intense pressure it seems to be under. As it builds, the title track takes on a gasping desperation. “Who am I? Who am I?” von Hausswolff asks. The song crests as she implores the listener to “accept the freedom in your soul,” breaking with the delirious tender-heartedness of the “My Heart Will Go On” key change. While von Hausswolff shares Celine Dion’s willingness to absolutely go for it, she finds her strength in solitude, rather than in the presence of another. “I’m breaking up with language/In search of something bigger than this,” she sings in “Stardust,” riding a bassline that lurches like it’s throwing off pursuers. Von Hausswolff and her ensemble are patient with these songs. They linger over them, giving them time and space to develop, even when they’re nearly at the boiling point.
Even in the shadow of von Hausswolff’s unabashedly dramatic delivery, the album’s atmospheric production speaks volumes. Like Nick Cave wandering the heavy firelight of Ghosteen, or Chuquimamani-Condori awash in the sentimentality of pop country, von Hausswolff creates spaces that throb with a wounded pulse. In “The Mouth,” she shrinks the entire ensemble down to shoebox size, sending it bouncing across stereo channels. The way “Struggle With the Beast” sounds like it’s being forced through the organ reminds me of Maggie Nelson describing the process of articulating unformed thought into blunt words as “like grinding a lump of wet clay through a hole.” At one point in the song, the group turns a corner into something resembling big-band Ethio-jazz, then returns to the theme with the flick of a wrist.
Sandsjö makes his debut with von Hausswolff’s ensemble here and instantly asserts himself as a key member of the group. Sometimes he sounds like Alabaster DePlume; sometimes he sounds like one of Steve Reich’s 18 musicians. In “Consensual Neglect,” the saxophonist takes a long and meditative solo that feels flecked with gold, then plays a stroboscopic section so intense it sounds like he’s crossfading between two dozen different solos at once. He gets heavier in “Stardust,” mimicking the shred of a death-metal guitarist—finger-tapping and all—while in “Facing Atlas,” his overlapping lines flap like black wings, cloaking a corner of the song in shadow. His horn is a secondary character whose clarity and directness makes the overall picture more legible.
Change can be diminishing. When your context shifts dramatically—when you look around and see that all of your statues have been toppled—it’s disorienting. It can be hard to reconcile how you’re still here even after the things that formed you are gone. On Iconoclasts, von Hausswolff leans into the dissociation, embracing bewilderment and rebirth. Solitary on her plinth, she becomes transcendent, made lighter by the experience of carrying something so heavy.
