Listen to other Herb Sundays playlistsJenny Hval, the acclaimed Norwegian artist and writer, has been one or those artists who I’ve known more about in theory than in listening practice until just about two years ago or so. One of my fave Herb discoveries (and on the Herb 150 playlist) was her song “Conceptual Romance” (Sacred Bones, 2016) which was picked by Okay Kaya (Herb 73) for her Herb playlist. It’s one of a handful of tracks every year that you remember where you were when you heard it. It feels like a new version of pop, an A/B test between two ideas sliding back and forth into view, not as versus-chorus-verse, almost like a crossfader moving between two dreams.Hurricane Hval hit our infrastructure yet again this year. Whilst researching my Trance playlists (Herb 141 & 142), some of the backstory of The Practice Of Love (Sacred Bones, 2019) album pointed back to the T-word via a Rolling Stone piece:“I kept coming back to trashy, mainstream trance music from the Nineties,” Hval wrote in a press release. “I don’t mean trashy in a bad sense, but in a beautiful one. The synth sounds are the things I imagined being played at the raves I was too young and too scared to attend, they were the sounds I associated with the people who were always driving around the two streets in the town where I grew up, the guys with the big stereo in the car that was always just pumping away. I liked the idea of playing with trance music in the true transcendental sense, those washy synths have lightness and clarity to them. I think I’m always looking for what sounds can bring me to write, and these synths made me write very open, honest lyrics.” This was Herb strike two.So when the new album was announced it felt like time to reach out. Iris Silver Mist (4AD, 2025) is racking up rave reviews (“shows music to be as transient as smoke, and yet an enduringly personal portal to memory, selfhood, the present and the dead.” - Katie Hawthorne, The Guardian *****) is indebted to the idea