Norwegian duo Lost Girls—artist and writer Jenny Hval and multi-instrumentalist Håvard Volden—will release their debut album, Menneskekollektivet, on Smalltown Supersound.

Menneskekollektivet is the duo’s first full-length after collaborating for more than 10 years, and it marks their first time they’ve recorded in an actual studio together.

The music flickers between club beats and improvised guitar textures—between spoken-word and melodic vocal textures, and between abstract and harmonic synth lines. “Throughout, Volden’s guitar and Hval’s voice come across as equals, wandering, wondering, meandering,” the label explains.

Menneskekollektivet was created in between set structures and the energy of collective exploration at Norway’s Øra Studios in March 2020. Hval concentrated on words as performed situations, sometimes just talking into the microphone to discover rhymes or musical phrases. They build emotional complexity like a club track would with its drum machine pattern, we’re told. Volden’s guitar, meanwhile, intensifies the feelings with lines that are sometimes jarring, sometimes harmonic.

Alongside the announcement, Lost Girls have shared “Menneskekollektivet,” the album’s title-track.

“The song started out with some synth chords Håvard played. I felt they sounded like the beginning of the world, or a world, so I wanted to improvise words to them that somehow expressed a beginning of a world,” explains Hval. “They don’t make sense like a written lyric should, but they are trying to make sense of something, a moment, a slow transition. On this track, the voice, and the music too, slowly makes its way from alone to together.”

Tracklisting

01. Menneskekollektivet
02. Losing Something
03. Carried by Invisible Bodies
04. Love, Lovers
05. Real Life

Menneskekollektivet LP will land digitally on March 26, with the physical release landing on April 23. Meanwhile, you can stream the title track below and pre-order here.