Lost Girls
Selvutsletter
SMALLTOWN SUPERSOUND
Jenny Hval’s music as a solo artist can be a bit dense to wrap one’s head around at times—enjoyable, accessible, but often highly conceptual. 2019’s The Practice of Love explored what romantic love means beyond its most recognizable clichés; 2016’s Blood Bitch intertwined ideas about menstruation via a unifying concept about vampires. Yet as one half of Lost Girls alongside Håvard Volden, Hval creates music that’s less explicitly tied to a thesis beyond the more intuitive joy of collaboration. It’s music that’s more physical, more social, and it’s meant to be experienced as such.
Where the duo’s 2021 debut album Menneskekollektivet featured electronic compositions that stretched out over extended periods of time (its most sprawling pieces cross beyond the 10-minute mark), Selvutsletter is (mostly) more concise and digestible, comprising eight pop songs that trade more heavily in the aesthetics of post-punk, complete with gloomy cascades of guitar. Yet while it’s at times darker, it likewise feels lighter, its songs given plenty of space to breathe within their hypnotic arrangements.
Though the duo’s debut album was crafted through loose sessions heavy on improvisation and an embrace of a more open-ended approach, Selvutsletter was written specifically to be performed at a festival in Lyon in 2022. That impetus toward writing for the live stage results in an even more immediate set of compositions that feel more grounded in songwriting fit for the urgency of the moment. Early single “With the Other Hand” even finds Hval setting the stage, literally, via a narrative focused on getting lost in the ecstasy of a live performance: “In the bar there’s a light / And it lights up a stage / Where you hear something / Unfamiliar / And strange.”
Even as Lost Girls’ music has undergone a streamlining of sorts on Selvutsletter, it feels no less exploratory. All eight of its songs remain based heavily in electronic beats and synth-laden atmospheres, but what they build within that framework is more eclectic and varied. The duo’s goth-rock influence (which Hval first hinted at back on Blood Bitch) is most strongly pronounced on the driving “Ruins,” which spirals glimmering guitar arpeggios and an undercurrent of saxophone against a pulsing bassline. The mesmerizing “Jeg Slutter Meg Selv” is one of Hval’s rare tracks to feature lyrics in Norwegian, though its main attraction is its dense layers of synth and throbbing house rhythm. And “Sea White,” the longest track at more than nine minutes, opens with a series of microtonal chimes before eventually congealing into a dreamy, psychedelic dirge to close out the album.
While the sound of the project continues to evolve, the spirit of a looser, more joyous form of creation remains on Selvutsletter. Lost Girls dial in their focus even as their horizon continues to expand.
