Film Stories October 2019

At first listen, The Practice of Love, Jenny Hval’s seventh full-length album, unspools with an almost deceptive ease. Across eight tracks, filled with arpeggiated synth washes and the kind of lilting beats that might have drifted, loose and unmoored, from some forgotten mid-’90s trance single, The Practice of Love feels, first and foremost, compellingly humane. Given the horror and viscera of her previous album, 2016’s Blood Bitch, The Practice of Love is almost subversive in its gentleness—a deep dive into what it means to grow older, to question one’s relationship to the earth and one’s self, and to hold a magnifying glass over the notion of what intimacy can mean. As Hval describes it, the album charts its own particular geography, a landscape in which multiple voices engage and disperse, and the question of connectedness—or lack thereof—hangs suspended in the architecture of every song. It is an album about “seeing things from above—almost like looking straight down into the ground, all of these vibrant forest landscapes, the type of nature where you might find a porn magazine at a certain place in the woods and everyone would know where it was, but even that would just become rotting paper, eventually melting into the ground.”

The shows celebrated the greatest hits from three decades and offered a breakneck trip through time and the entire HELLOWEEN repertoire – including songs, the band hadn’t played live for a very long time, or even never before. The Pumpkins United World Tour caused a metal quake that was on almost every genre cover, and made the world’s biggest metal magazine »BURRN!« dedicate an incredible four cover stories to the tour. After dates in the US and additional shows in Latin America, this tour for the ages ended in December 2018 with a highly emotional finale in Hamburg, where it all began in 1984. – Unforgettable metal nights that fans as well as musicians would love to experience again and again.