Hausswolff learned piano, found her voice, then stepped into churches to study the organ, drawn by its scale and mechanics. The instrument’s physicality became central to her writing, hands, feet, and stops moving as one body. Architecture studies at Chalmers and in Copenhagen refined her sense of space, sequence, and material, shaping how she now writes for organ and woodwinds and the role the voice plays in her music.
On her new, seventh album, ICONOCLASTS, Hausswolff plays with instruments, sound, and space in new ways that bring an almost physical charge to her music. Woodwinds, organ, and voice move in shifting patterns, their weight carried by air and pulse rather than melody alone. She worked closely with saxophonist Otis Sandsjö, whose phrasing opened new tonal routes and taught her how to write for breath as much as for keys. The album’s structure grew from this exchange, shaped around movement and release.
Hausswolff has called ICONOCLASTS “a battle cry,” a phrase that describes process more than message, a refusal to stay still or repeat gestures out of habit. Across the album’s twelve pieces she shapes form through physical choices, stacked organ drones, rhythms with a mechanical pull, and bending woodwind lines, with pauses that carry weight. You hear it in the heaving rhythm of Struggle with the Beast and in the stillness of An Ocean of Time. She brings in Iggy Pop, Ethel Cain, and Abul Mogard, their voices used as instruments as much as singers. Through it all the organ remains the grounding force, shaping how the music breathes and holds space.
ICONOCLASTS is more than a record of songs. It is a constructed space where sound becomes thought and those thoughts move through confrontation, uncertainty and resolve, ugliness and beauty, and grace. It is an extraordinary work of art, almost physical in nature, and built to be felt as much as heard.
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