Jenny Hval Announces New Album Blood Bitch, Shares “Female Vampire”: Listen

Last year, Jenny Hval released a new album called Apocalypse, girl. She’s following it up this year with Blood Bitch. It’s out September 30 via Sacred Bones, and it features the below track, “Female Vampire.” In a statement, Hval called the album “an investigation of blood.” She elaborated that the album is specifically about “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.” Find the rest of her statement below along with the album's artwork. Hval has also announced a series of tour dates; she’s playing this year’s Pitchfork Music Festival on July 16. 

Read “Jenny Hval's Soft Dick Rock.”

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.

Blood Bitch:

01 Ritual Awakening
02 Female Vampire
03 In the Red
04 Conceptual Romance
05 Untamed Region
06 The Great Undressing
07 Period Piece
08 The Plague
09 Secret Touch
10 Lorna

Jenny Hval:

06-03 Dudingen, Switzerland - Kilbi Festival
06-04 Barcelona, Spain - Primavera Sound Festival
07-16 Chicago, IL - Pitchfork Festival
08-05 Katowice, Poland - Off Festival
09-01-04 Wiltshire, England - End of the Road
09-30 New York, NY - Le Poisson Rouge
10-17 Glasgow, Scotland - Stereo
10-18 Manchester, England - Soup Kitchen
10-19 London, England - Oslo
10-21 Brussels, Belgium - AB
10-22 Paris, France - Point Ephemere
10-24 Luzern, Switzerland - Suedpol
10-26 Berlin, Germany - Kantine am Berghain
10-27 Amsterdam, Netherlands - De School
10-28 Hamburg, Germany - Kampnagel
10-29 Copenhagen, Denmark - Jazzhouse
11-11 Los Angeles, CA - Resident

Watch the video for “Innocence Is Kinky” via Pitchfork.tv:

via Evan Minsker