ANNA VON HAUSSWOLFF - Iconoclasts 2LP (Preorder)

NB! Preorder item, shipping early January.

The Swedish composer and organist makes imposing, monolithic music, but the themes she addresses in her singing—love, heartache, renewal—are resolutely human in scale.

Over the past decade, Swedish composer and organist Anna von Hausswolff has fashioned her instrument’s blasts of air into cavernous spaces that drip with oversized exhalations. With Iconoclasts, she not only shapes the kind of terrible majesty she created with her mostly instrumental 2020 record All Thoughts Fly, she sings to fill it with heartache, longing, rupture, pain, love—normal, human-sized things whose personal stakes she builds to appropriately towering proportions. With sky-high production to accommodate her songs’ unabashed maximalism, Iconoclasts feels like a triumphant requiem for dead relationships and the carapaces of old selves.

As the title suggests, many of Iconoclasts’ songs concern themselves with the destruction of idols, whether former lovers, beliefs, or aesthetic principles. Accordingly, the album vibrates with the energy of the recently liberated, even if at times you might mistake it for the shivering of heartache.

Change can be diminishing. When your context shifts dramatically—when you look around and see that all of your statues have been toppled—it’s disorienting. It can be hard to reconcile how you’re still here even after the things that formed you are gone. On Iconoclasts, von Hausswolff leans into the dissociation, embracing bewilderment and rebirth. Solitary on her plinth, she becomes transcendent, made lighter by the experience of carrying something so heavy. (pitchfork)

Double black vinyl LP in gatefold sleeve and printed inner sleeves

Year0001 2025