Our Album of the Week these days is ‘ICONOCLASTS’. The Swedish experimental artist Anna von Hausswolff has delivered the most immediate album of her career, in part thanks to the collaborations it contains with people as diverse as Iggy Pop or Ethel Cain. ‘Stardust’ is the poppiest song on the album, but this one is full of gems like ‘Struggle with the Beast’, which we selected as Song of the Day today.
At almost 9 minutes and dominated by a wind riff that repeats itself ad nauseum, ‘Struggle with the Beast’ is the living portrait of madness. It is as if those instruments dominated by Otis Sandsjö wanted to portray the insistence of an intrusive thought on a loop. Like this one, we can’t get that passage out of our heads.
The lyrics, which take 3 and a half minutes to begin, are the first-person account of someone who has lost his mind:
«I called the hospital this morning,
I had the feeling
of losing my head
of losing control
I’m tempting my sister and my mother
My eyes are not human, but they are calm
The sun sets
I’m not following any rules.”
After 4 verses and no chorus (the zenith of the song is the cry “people are dying out there and I’m fucking with myself”), the song closes ambiguously with the image of an angel. A string section bursts in before returning to the arena of the horn riff, in what is one of the most abrasive recordings ever made by Anna von Hausswolff.
In a press release sent to us by her international team, Anna explains that this topic is not about herself, despite that first adopted person: «I wrote this song after a close friend suffered an episode of psychosis. There was something unstoppable and completely disconnected about her, as if she lived in some kind of parallel universe. He was so far from the person I knew, it was as if all his social barriers had completely vanished. There was a strange new brilliance in his way of communicating and being. It didn’t have filters. “I’m glad he’s okay today, but it made me think about how vulnerable and complex we all are, and how within each of us there are layers of unresolved trauma and truths that haven’t been spoken out loud.”
