Jenny Hval – Blood Bitch

Released only a year after career highlight Apocalypse, Girl, Norwegian experimentalist Jenny Hval’s latest album shows her eschewing sonic grandness to retreat into a battle with herself. 

Blood Bitch has a more fearful tone than its predecessor. This time out, Hval’s ambient experiments are influenced by the black metal of her home country, and industrial noise artists like labelmate Pharmakon. Hval balances these with synth-led songs such as the urgently racing Female Vampire and the gorgeously pillowy Conceptual Romance, which contains the closest to a pure pop chorus that she has ever written.

Underneath the album’s horror tropes, Hval’s voice and reflections are powerful as ever, ultimately making Blood Bitch less the conceptual work that it professes to be than a curious study of a restless musician fighting to keep her insecurities at bay. Hval’s most personal record, Blood Bitch is an understated but intriguing album by a perpetually fascinating artist.

Listen to: Female Vampire, Conceptual Romance