Photo credit: Maria Louceiro
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Over the last few years Norwegian artist Tuva Hellum Marschhäuser has proven herself a master of crafting songs that capture a special atmosphere in her sound, that paint a shapeshifting world of burning emotion, music that spellbinds.
Tuvaband’s debut album Soft Drop saw her write songs that were airy, ghostly and effortlessly cinematic, while its follow-up I Entered The Void (which earned a nomination for a Norwegian Grammy) pushed her sound into rougher, heavier atmospheric rock. But what unites all her music is its raw intensity – her songs have fires inside them, and listening is like being pulled into the flame. And now with her new album Growing Pains & Pleasures, she’s set to take her songwriting to new levels and to adventurously push the boundaries of her musical world.
The story of Growing Pains & Pleasures starts in Venice. Tuva spent a week working in Italian city in early 2019. In a cavernous house, in the shadows of its tall dark rooms, she began to work on the lyrics for her new songs. Finding herself in the murky, silent house, it became sort of a parallel world for the journeys she was taking into the shadowy spaces of her own mind in her lyrics.
I Entered The Void was about isolation, the story of Tuva cutting herself off from society and the effect that process had on her. Growing Pains & Pleasures is about trying to find her way back. “When you’re in isolation you don’t meet many people”, she says, “and there are few impressions from the outside world. So coming out of isolation can be an overwhelming experience - in ways both good and bad. A lot of the songs have feelings of fear; an irrational and vague, but constant fear”.
It’s an album fueled by change - changes in Tuva’s life, changes happening around her, and changes she realized she was going through herself. The album’s title, Growing Pains & Pleasures, describes her journey through those changes, the stress of the ground moving underneath your feet and the world shaking as you realize you’re not the same person you always were. “I always thought that you stop changing and developing when you become an adult”, she says. “But it was in my late twenties that I started changing the most. A friend once said ‘Tuva, you seem so self-assured. You always know what you’re doing and what you want’. I thought that was true - until everything changed. At the start, I rejected the change. After a while I realized that I had to accept it. I’ve realized that fully mature things rot”.
The writing and production on the album is all Tuva’s own, and the music started with her in the studio, crafting intricate demo versions of each song. I Entered The Void had been a toughsounding album - on Growing Pains & Pleasures she decided to take a step back from the heaviness in that sound. “People always said my music was cute, which almost offended me, because especially if you look at the lyrics, it wasn’t. So I wanted I Entered The Void to be tough, rough and edgy. Now, I feel I no longer have to convince everyone that my music is tough”. With less of an ideological manifesto steering the sound, she could focus on the songwriting, and on this album, it’s some of her strongest yet, a rich, detailed sound that pulls the best elements of her style to-date, and is a perfect playground for her magical vocals.
In her own studio, Tuva was determined to capture the musical vision in her head as thoroughly as she could, and spent months on the demoes, recording every part herself, even going as far as to record bass parts on the top four strings of her guitar and program the drums herself, which in the final recording the musician Kenneth Ishak played on real drums. "I didn't know too much about drums, but I knew what I wanted, and I knew even more what I didn't want", she says “some of the drum fills on this album still make me laugh and I like them a lot”. The demos she took to the studio to re-record parts of them, were so fully developed that in the end, she realized that she wanted to keep large parts of them on the record. “It was never my intention to be the guitarist on the album, as I usually only use the guitar to compose. But I really liked the guitars, and it was also the first time somebody said my own guitar-playing was cool. So I decided to keep it. So most of the material from the drafts is still on there”.
In the end, Growing Pains & Pleasures isn’t a radical new vision for Tuvaband, but its strength is that it captures what she’s always been strong at and takes it to a whole new level. The songs have a strange magic in them, and most importantly, they have the burning honesty and emotional power so important in her music. That’s what anchors her to the songs, and is what makes this whole thing matter to her. “I need to feel something with the songs, I need the lyrics to mean something to me. All the work, the entire process, has to mean something to me. I wouldn’t sit and write lyrics if not to help myself get something out, because I have so much to get off my chest”.