New album Growing Pains & Pleasures
he solo project of Norwegian singer, songwriter, and producer, Tuva Hellum Marschhäuser, she has proven herself as a master of crafting songs that capture a special atmosphere in her sound. 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.
With Tuvaband’s new album Growing Pains & Pleasures, she’s set to take her songwriting to new levels and adventurously push the boundaries of her musical world.
The story of Growing Pains & Pleasures starts in Venice, where Tuva spent a week working 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.
“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 fuelled by change - changes in Tuva’s life, changes happening around her, and changes she realised 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 realise 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 realised that I had to accept it. I’ve realised 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 tough-sounding 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.
