If you’re trying to build something big, the pipe organ will excavate the space for you. Indie-rock bands begging for gravitas, mystics christening avant-garde civic architecture, conceptual geniuses following the fractals of human depravity and the xenophobic state—they’ve all used the rafter-rattling boom of the pipe organ as a way to construct vastness; if cathedrals didn’t already exist, the flying buttresses of the pipe organ’s groans would have called them into being. In other words, it’s an instrument designed to make a human being, with all of our inner depths, seem very small indeed. You pluck the lyre; God rumbles the pipes.
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. “I’ll tell you the whole truth,” she sings in standout “The Whole Woman,” a duet with Iggy Pop. “And you will see me as the woman that I am.”
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. After saxophonist Otis Sandsjö scribbles heart-shaped patterns over the gothic-jazz overture “The Beast,” von Hausswolff lays out the record’s thesis. “I fought so much for you, for us, our life here,” she sings with the poise of someone who’s taken a deep breath and counted to three. “But now you need to go.” The ensemble bursts into flame, dense organ and clashing cymbals underscoring her dismissal. Across the album, her vocals are buoyant like a bruise, deep purple tones and half-formed blues rising as if from tender skin.
