For some, the pandemic must seem like a distant (repressed) memory, yet Jenny Hval’s 9th studio album, Iris Silver Mist, uses lockdown as a direct conduit to those otherworldly times. Formed around the idea of the natural loss of sensory experience — in this case, those familiar, comforting smells of her past and present — Hval creates something tactile and brilliantly textured; a rich, performance-based cadre of songs that linger long after first listen.

Layered on a bed of synthesisers and ambient environmental recordings — the crunch of gravel, birdsong, the roar of a plane — these songs inhabit so much space, taking up residence in the imagination and frequently changing form, from the auditory to the physical. The album’s title comes from a particular French scent, which she has described as the sensation of being “close to ghosts.” This mix of the olfactory and the ethereal is something that repeats often, seeping into each track to create the illusion of suggestion — songs that flit from sharp focus to the periphery and back again.

Nowhere is this more apparent than on ‘To be a rose’ — a slight, pulsing backbeat and Hval’s voice coming to you from oblique angles, building from ephemeral beginnings into a song fully formed. ‘All night long’ sounds like a natural progression from Broadcast’s Tender Buttons — the closest we’ve gotten to Trish Keenan’s dissociative cool. Opener ‘Lay down’ evokes Talk Talk’s magnum opus Spirit of Eden, a lush meadow of strings and Hval’s trilling vocal meandering above a tambourine and snare drum.

Often, songs will either bleed into one another, lurch into jarring sound effects, or have their endings obliterated completely, giving the impression of some kind of phantom mixtape. If this sounds performative, that’s pretty much the whole idea. ‘I don’t know what free is’ alludes to the very notion of what performance is — and what happens in its absence: “… a performance is something that takes place / Or, even better, someone who is present.” Lockdown removing that intimacy — the sounds, the smells, the physical act of performance — is at the crux of the album.

That song’s easy bossa nova rhythm, interspersed with breakbeats, anchors all of Hval’s ideas for the album, emphasising how much we missed the experience of live music and everything that comes with it. The shape-changing nature of Iris Silver Mist and especially haunting vignettes like ‘Heiner Muller’ can leave you breathless — that kind of lightheaded feeling when you haven’t eaten all day. The only remedy is to fully submit to Jenny Hval’s brilliance and find your neutral space. I want the end to sound like this.