Jenny Hval’s New Album Is Called Blood Bitch And It’s About Periods
Today Jenny Hval announced the follow-up to her 2015 album Apocalypse girl. Hval concerns herself with below-the-surface tensions and uses experimental production and brittle singing techniques to create songs that are unsettling, spooky, and intimate. The Norwegian singer and producer worked with Lasse Marhaug on the record, which is called Blood Bitch and is out 9/30 via Sacred Bones. Hval wrote extensively about what the album is meant to convey, read her words below, check out the tracklist and listen to lead single “Female Vampire” below.
“Blood Bitch is an investigation of blood. Blood that is shed naturally. The purest and most powerful, yet most trivial, and most terrifying blood: Menstruation. The white and red toilet roll chain which ties together the virgins, the whores, the mothers, the witches, the dreamers, and the lovers.
Blood Bitch is also a fictitious story, fed by characters and images from horror and exploitation films of the ’70s. With that language, rather than smart, modern social commentary, I found I could tell a different story about myself and my own time: a poetic diary of modern transience and transcendence.
There is a character in this story that is a vampire Orlando, traveling through time and space. But there is also a story here of a 35-year old artist stuck in a touring loop, and wearing a black wig. She is always up at night, jet lagged, playing late night shows – and by day she is quietly resting over an Arp Odyssey synthesizer while a black van drives her around Europe and America.
So this is my most fictional and most personal album. It’s also the first album where I’ve started reconnecting with the goth and metal scene I started out playing in many years ago, by remembering the drony qualities of Norwegian Black Metal. It’s an album of vampires, lunar cycles, sticky choruses, and the smell of warm leaves and winter.”
Blood Bitch tracklist:
Blood Bitch Tracklist:
01 “Ritual Awakening”
02 “Female Vampire”
03 “In The Red”
04 “Conceptual Romance”
05 “Untamed Region”
06 “The Great Undressing”
07 “Period Piece”
08 “The Plague”
09 “Secret Touch”
10 “Lorna”
Pre-order Blood Bitch, out 9/30 via Sacred Bones, here.