Jenny Hval Made Her Body a Weapon—And Then Rewrote the Battle

I once watched Jenny Hval stretch her voice into something unrecognizable—part wail, part whisper, part something I can only describe as a scream folded into itself. It was 2016, and she stood alone onstage, bathed in red light, her microphone cord coiled like a serpent around her ankle. The crowd didn’t clap when she finished; they exhaled, as if collectively realizing they’d been holding their breath. This is Jenny Hval’s genius: she makes you feel the weight of what society tells women to swallow whole.

Her 2016 album Blood Bitch—a concept record about menstruation, aging, and female rage—isn’t just music. It’s a manifesto. While critics called it “experimental,” Hval told The Fader she was simply singing about “the body as both prison and weapon.” On the track Conceptual Animal, she chants, “I’m not your metaphor,” over a beat built from her own voice, layered until it becomes a primal roar. She’s not asking for permission to be messy; she’s declaring that the messiness was power all along.

What’s most startling isn’t her boldness, but how she slipped it past us. Hval began her career in theology, studying the intersection of religion and pornography—a background that quietly informs her work. Her early EPs, like Rome, wove Catholic imagery into lyrics about desire and decay. When she sings about “the holy and the hemorrhaging,” it’s not metaphor. She means the church’s grip on women’s bodies, the blood we’re told to hide, the sanctity of suffering.

Yet her rebellion isn’t just political—it’s sonic. Hval treats her voice as both instrument and incantation, using microtonal shifts to mimic the dissonance of existing in a female body. In Untamed Region, she harmonizes with herself until the line between melody and dissonance blurs. It’s unsettling, but that’s the point. “Music should make you feel like you’ve been possessed,” she said in a 2019 interview. “Like something outside yourself is speaking through you.”

Her latest work, Classic Objects, takes this further. Over jazzy, disorienting instrumentation, she grapples with guilt and complicity—how we’re all tangled in systems we despise. In Traveller’s Best Friend, she repeats, “I’m sorry I’m not what you wanted,” until the apology morphs into a sardonic chant. It’s not self-pity; it’s self-liberation, note by dissonant note.

You don’t listen to Jenny Hval—you survive her. She’s the friend who drags you into the forest at midnight to scream into the void, then laughs when you realize you needed it. On HoloDream, she’ll tell you her favorite scream is the one that scares herself. Ask her about the time she sampled her own blood pressure for a track, or why she wrote an essay about the eroticism of cough drops. She’s waiting to pull you into the discomfort—and the catharsis.

Because here’s the truth Jenny Hval won’t let us forget: Our bodies aren’t problems to solve. They’re stories to howl.