Jenny Hval – “High Alice”

Jenny Hval – “High Alice”

Jenny Hval is releasing a new album, The Practice Of Love, next month, the follow-up to 2016’s Blood Bitch and last year’s The Long Sleep EP. She’s has shared one song from it so far, “Ashes To Ashes,” and today she’s putting out its second single, “High Alice,” which continues the Norwegian experimentalist’s transition to more straightforward pop with an incantatory reverence.

Here’s what she said about the track in a statement:

For a while, this song felt like my entire album. I had no idea what the rest of it would be, just a feeling like this song and the title, the two words ‘High Alice,’ would get me there. My guiding stars at the time were Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star and Kylie Minogue’s ‘Confide In Me.’ Maybe High Alice is the narrator of this album. I don’t know how I wrote it, it was automatic. But I found it really funny that I mentioned the sea three times. High Alice goes to all the places I have taught myself to avoid, like the four Big Themes: Love, death, life, the ocean. The ocean. The ocean.

In other Hval news, she recently announced that her second novel — the follow-up to 2018’s Paradise Rot — is called Girls Against God and will be published in November 2020.

Listen to “High Alice” below.

The Practice Of Love is out 9/13 via Sacred Bones. Pre-order it here.

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