For a certain set of listeners—feminist pop fans, post-punk philosophers, people who like to feel as much as they like to think—Jenny Hval has become ever more heroic with each album. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m complex and intellectual,” the Norwegian avant-gardist sang on her fifth full-length, 2015’s Apocalypse, girl. Hval, now 37, has made her name on slyly affirming moments like this: self-reflexive, conceptual, at once serious and fun. She consistently extends the boundaries of herself. Hval’s most recent LP, 2016’s Blood Bitch, was inspired by vampire movies, Chris Kraus’ book I Love Dick, and period blood; it won the prestigious Nordic Music Prize. There is no doubt that Hval is complex and intellectual. But that lyric, from a song called “Why This,” was moving because it sounded like Hval needed to convince herself in order to keep going. We all do sometimes.
Lost Girls is Hval’s latest collaboration with the multi-instrumentalist Håvard Volden, who also plays in her live band. Hval and Volden previously recorded under the name Nude on Sand, releasing a more organic-sounding 2012 record of Volden’s acoustic guitar experiments and Hval’s feather-light singing. The new Feeling EP is a stark and welcomed turn. Its two extended compositions center on Hval’s spoken word, deep rhythms, and a feeling of dislocation. “Accept,” the largely instrumental B-side, is an 11-minute hybrid of wide-open free jazz drumming, blown-out blast beats, and B-movie horror vocalizations. Hval repeats “accept the risk” with a bracing intimacy; she audibly does.
But the 14-minute monologue “Drive” is Feeling’s main concern—like a lucid sonic essay, an episodic mix of synth-pop, tablas, and criticism at once. What begins with Hval observing her surroundings while in the van on tour (and musing on her destination: the gig) soon grows heavier. “Drive” comes to feel like some innocuous daydream that sneaks up on you and sucks you into the void.
If Feeling is a footnote to Hval’s primary work, then it’s an essential one. For Hval is the best kind of punk thinker: a natural skeptic whose curiosity about the world remains boundless, from anarchism and porn to religion and romcoms. She sees through everything. On “Drive,” simply by describing what’s around her, she covers the creature-comforts of capitalism, patriarchy, performer-audience dynamics, and the similarities between underground and mainstream culture. It is hard to imagine another artist who could make such a heady undertaking transmit so much emotion—melancholy, power, care, and joy.
Hval and Varden have said that “Drive” was initially inspired by the blustering hardcore aggression of Black Flag, before they got into the late opera composer Robert Ashley and it changed. But watching Ashley’s dreamlike, absurdist operas for television, such as 1978’s “Perfect Lives” (Ashley preferred not to wait for the permission and space of the opera establishment) there are parallels to 1980s SST punk. Both antagonized convention with an audacious and uncompromised outsider perspective; they were based in raw language and personal transformation. These qualities take shape on Feeling as well.
Hval bears her process on “Drive”—she confesses to watching herself on YouTube, to listening to her own music—and it all comes to a potent conclusion as she states her ultimate goal: “I want us all to cry together… in the empty clubs.” But then she catches herself. “What am I saying? I want you all to cry with me? Isn’t that just manipulation?” Hval lets the seams of her thinking show and she wonders if what she’s doing isn’t just as evil as the “arena concerts” or “mainstream movies” that plunder our base emotions, warping our expectations of reality when they introduce violence or violins or “kissing in the rain.”
But what Hval shows here is empathy. She knows how confusing it is to just live. As her logic deepens, the music grows more wrenching and intense; the drums hit harder and crisper; her voice melodically twirls for emphasis. “Feeling something and you don’t know why,” Hval grapples, before fine-tuning it: “Let me rephrase that/Feeling something/But you don’t know who you are.” Hval’s work, though, has an opposite effect: It makes lost girls feel seen.
