NEW ALBUMS
LOST GIRLS
Jenny Hval’s highbrow electronic explorations.
By Wyndham Wallace
Searching out the best albums new to Uncut
Menneskekollektivet
SMALLTOWN SUPERSOUND
8/10
“IN the beginning, there is no word and no ‘I’,” Jenny Hval intones at the start of Menneskekollektivet, her debut album with fellow Norwegian Håvard Volden under the moniker Lost Girls. “In the beginning, there is sound.” As any musician invited to perform extempore will know, this is an appropriate premise upon which to improvise: to sacrifice one’s self to the greater good of music is often crucial to its success, and a useful means too by which to focus on communication at its most fundamental. In the wrong hands, of course, the concept sometimes provokes more unfiltered ineptitude than divine inspiration. But Hval and Volden are far from strangers. Consequently, the dangers in them establishing their own creation myth are limited.
Volden first contributed to Hval’s music on 2008’s Medea, recorded under her earlier pseudonym, Rockettothesky, and he’s played regularly in her live band since. More importantly, they have already collaborated in the studio, releasing a self-titled album in 2012 as Nude On Sand – a largely acoustic and significantly less accessible collection than this – before announcing themselves as Lost Girls with 2018’s lengthy two-track EP, “Feeling”, which provided a more recognisable, if noisier, template for their endeavours here. That they’re now familiar with one another’s methods in multiple scenarios shows: whether in the opening title track’s slow gestation or the interplay at the end of the 15-minute “Love, Lovers”, between Hval’s impromptu vocals and Volden’s fluid multi-instrumental arrangements, they seek to locate space between spontaneity and structure, both musical and lyrical, where imperfection is not necessarily a flaw.
Unexpectedly, they do this in a manner sometimes comparable to Underworld, partially because both trade in club-friendly crescendos and also because, as the latter’s expansive Drift project suggested, they’re similarly acquainted with the belief that music is no less for being perpetually ‘unfinished’.