Vinyl LP
At the 2:20 mark of The Long Sleep’s opening track, “Spells,” Jenny Hval’s voice rises from an otherwise calm, steady jazz-pop base. The simple swing of the music recalls Kaputt-era Destroyer or David Bowie’s “Absolute Beginners.” “You will not be awake for long / You won’t have to wait for long,” sings Hval, initiating a subtle yet anthemic refrain that repeats throughout the track, sometimes mutating with respect to pronoun (“you” vs. “we”) and whether her voice is single or multi-tracked. Like “Absolute Beginners,” “Spells” ends up feeling both triumphant and intimate, both timeless and, in its rhythmic consistency, endless. Hval doubles this sense of endlessness, too, by having her refrain pour over into the second song of the EP. There, her now-familiar vocal line serves as a hinge between two distinct compositional segments (a sparse piano ballad and a jittering mass of vocals), facilitating a conversation between them.
Conversation has long been central to Hval’s music. Many of her songs stage actual or imagined dialogues between human characters or broader entities. Yet where previous Hval releases, such as 2016’s Blood Bitch, employ direct modes of address—loaded language, narrative specificity, audio-visual doubling—The Long Sleep presents conversations that, like the music itself, are a little more spaced out and abstract. There are “you”s and “me”s, but the nature of their relationships tends to drift into the atmosphere, like Hval’s soaring voice on “Spells.” They exist—to use a lyric from that song—“in the smallest great unknown.”
On the short, spoken final track, Hval appears to analyze her own songwriting approach: “There is nothing useful in the way we define you or me in this context,” she says, later adding, “It’s not in the words.” Indeed, the interactions throughout the EP are open-ended, staged within the recordings—the multi-tracked vocals, track two’s sparring ideas—rather than in the text. The EP’s nearly 11-minute title track removes language altogether. Its few vocalizations are quiet, wordless, fragmented, floating in a formless and diverse stream of sound: the most palpable aural manifestation of that “great unknown.”
