A lot of these songs are about love, in various ways, but I wanted the album to feel like a battle cry. It felt urgent to me to express a sense of wanting things to change and actually taking steps towards that change.
The foolish hope of great eternal beauty
This shit breaks my heart
Of course, this is Anna von Hausswolff we’re talking about, so that line in Facing Atlas comes attached with that voice, that incredibly powerful and borderline counter-musical battering ram of an instrument, perhaps one of the only human talents on Earth that could ever hope to position itself among the maximalist sturm und drang of Von Hausswolf’s music and not be immediately crushed to pieces by the musical waves crashing all around it: “This shit breeeeea-a-ye-aaaaaaaaaayks ma heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar…!!”
On Von Hausswolf’s previous studio album, 2020’s ‘All Thoughts Fly‘, the Swedish avant-gardist didn’t even attempt to match herself: the album was wholly instrumental, and featured only Von Hausswolf’s Hammond organ – the other instrument that she’s most known for. Even this was too much for many people though: when attempting to tour the record in 2021, far right Catholic protestors forced the cancellation of a gig at churches in Nantes and Paris, and lead to increased security at similar gigs in Brussels and Den Haag.
I can understand the fear of losing your sacred space to something that you feel doesn’t necessarily align with it, and I would have liked to explain to them why I was there, what my intention was, and that I have a lot of love and respect for that space. But I felt their anger, and I felt the sort of belief that makes you see the world in black and white.
The protests and the hatred that her music somehow managed to ignite within people, “the screaming and people banging on the doors“, understandably had a daunting effect on Anna von Hausswolf, and it would have been completely understandable had her next album seen her retreat further into herself – make herself smaller, less abrasive, far less potentially offensive.
Until she thought… no… What would Kendrick Lamar do?
I feel like he’s one of those artists who’s so good at not dwelling in the darkness but rising above it, putting a spotlight on problems and openly encouraging change. He might actually have been the most important artist for ‘ICONOCLASTS’, even if you can’t hear it in the music.
So, instead, she went BIG. And she went FUCKING INCREDIBLE.
‘ICONOCLASTS’ is the sound of an already frequently maximalist artist somehow putting everything up to twelve. Every one of the album’s 73 minutes – each one of its four thousand four hundred and nine seconds – contains more ideas, more musicianship, more craft, more brutal beauty than most other 2025 records contain in their entire runtime. I would have previously argued that Von Hausswolf’s 2022 live album was the greatest recorded example of their genius, as she’s previously struggled to translate the cacophonous, bone rattling (and Catholic angering) everythingness of her sound in a studio setting. ‘ICONOCLASTS, however,’ manages to rope off and exhibit Von Hausswolf’s wild beast of expression, like some Victorian carny freakshow somehow managing to travel with King Kong in the show. This feels unethical though, surely something as wild and as dangerous as Anna von Hausswolf shouldn’t be kept in the cage of a recording studio?? She needs to be let free!!
Von Hausswolf’s sixth album is also her most ‘commercial’, and the the way in which the album manages to marry classic ‘Hausswolf-core’ aural apocalypses like Struggle With the Beast with gosh darn lovely and dang near standard pieces of beautiful music like This Whole Woman (with Iggy Pop) and Aging Young Woman (with Ethel freaking Cain*) is an astonishingly adept stroke of genius. ‘ICONOCLASTS’ is hardly Von Hausswolf’s big sell out record, but the integration of slightly more standardised songwriting in places only opens up the feasibility of of one of the era’s most talented songwriters. There are now no barriers at all to falling in love with this artist. There are no more excuses!! And I should stress the important caveat of context there – her last album was an organ only record recorded on a replica of a 17th-century German baroque organ in a church in Gothenburg, remember – ‘ICONOCLASTS’ is a ‘commercial’ sounding record by Anna von Hausswolf’s standards. To quote Alexis Petridis in The Guardian: “it sounds a little like Lana Del Rey, had Del Rey somehow contrived to end up at the bottom of a well”.
(*seriously, there’s a certain type of person who would have actually self-combusted when that collaboration was announced)
‘ICONOCLASTS’ sounds like the absolute extremes of musical potential. Von Hausswolf’s always astonishing organ drones more focused and euphoric than ever before. The centrality of genre defying avant garde saxophonist Otis Sandsjö and his superficially formless insanity injects the album with a constant sense of chaos, no matter how close to standard songcraft the music occasional gets. And while lines such as “the sky is crashing down upon the ships of freedom” make sure that the lyrics are always relatable to current events, the album is reaching for a overwhelming truth that dumb old language could never explain:
I’m breaking up with language
In search of something bigger than this
While the animals are screaming
My ecstasy gives grace
It’s time to make mistakes
These mistakes, though, don’t arrive on ‘ICONOCLASTS’.
It’s a perfect record.
ICONOCLASTS’ is literally mind blowing. The ambition; the craft; the musicianship; the scope; the sheer motherfucking everything of this record, will make your jaw literally drop.
2025 was a particular strong one for astonishingly good albums. Anna von Hausswolf still shits all over them. ‘
2022 #29 (+28)
OK, I’ll just about accept that. The users are fucking idiots though, only rating it 83.
Mate, patience! The faste cool part starts at the seven minute mark!
And the albums of the year are done!! Nobody won the competition, by the way, so I get the keep the prize myself. The Legit Boss songs of the year will drop in a couple of weeks, just let me have a peaceful New Year, OK?
Necessary Evil 