Jenny Hval Blood Bitch

Norwegian experimentalist Jenny Hval put out one of the best albums of last year in Apocalypse, girl, a tangled, entrancing exploration of bodies and gender and sexuality. Now she’s announcing its follow-up, Blood Bitch, which she co-produced with Norwegian noise titan Lasse Marhaug and which will be out this fall. Here’s what Hval writes about the album in a press release:

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.

First single “Female Vampire” is absolutely bewitching, and you should listen to it :

1. Ritual Awakening
2. Female Vampire
3. In the Red
4. Conceptual Romance
5. Untamed Region
6. The Great Undressing
7. Period Piece
8. The Plague
9. Secret Touch
10. Lorna