ICONOCLASTS
by Anna von Hausswolff

released: 31/10/2025
runtime: 72:50
genres: art rock, post-rock

review written: 19/12/2025
listened: 5x

★★★★☆

Anna von Hausswolff released her sixth album ICONOCLASTS on Halloween, and it certainly sounds like it. It’s not creepy, but it definitely takes influences from darker aesthetics (von Hausswolff credits artists like Chelsea Wolfe as inspiration here). With woodwind, strings, church organ, and even saxophone across most of the tracks, ICONOCLASTS takes a lot of instrumental influence from orchestras, and it sounds just as epic as you would expect an art rock album made by an organist to sound. From the second it starts to the release’s end nearly 73 minutes later, you are absorbed into the world of the album. The first track is an instrumental, and sets the scene of the album amazingly in terms of what you should expect from the compositional style, melodic lines, use of instrumentation, and atmosphere. Von Hausswolff has a very recognisable voice, and her vocals are consistently powerful and dramatic as they sit above the rest of each composition.

Each song is perfectly crafted; the compositional work is consistently complex without being overwhelming, and the production and mixing only work to elevate this feeling, constantly drawing your ear to whichever of the many layers of each song von Hausswolff wants to bring to the foreground at that moment. Take the 11-minute epic ‘The Iconoclast’: a personal highlight of this song is the saxophone solo (played by Otis Sandsjö) around 9 minutes in. Melodically, it’s a brilliant solo, but what really elevates it is the fact that you can, by design, hear the keys of the saxophone being pressed underneath the melody, adding just another layer to the song in a very human manner. As the song ends, von Hausswolff sings “Can I protect you, Godly creation?”, her voice soaring over the rest of the mix in a truly beautiful culmination of the song.

Throughout all the album, von Hausswolff’s lyrics paint beautiful pictures about many different topics. ‘Aging Young Women’ deals with unsurety about starting a family, ‘Facing Atlas’ compares Atlas’s burden of holding up the sky with commitment and control over one’s life, and the record as a whole has many references to spirituality and especially iconoclasm, the practice of destroying religious icons that the record is named after. The record also features vocals from Iggy Pop and Ethel Cain. Both of their performances work very well; Cain’s vocals blend more into the atmosphere of the track while Pop’s vocals add a contrast which feels a little jarring at first, but with every listen I feel works better. Both artists also have duets with von Hausswolff, which are both really beautiful, and add yet more layers to this intense piece of music.

The percussion across the whole release is very notable. Von Hausswolff’s use of drums acts as an intense and relentless driving force, constantly pushing the music forwards and making it feel like each song is almost running away from you. I find this especially notable in ‘Struggle with the Beast’; combined with the repeating saxophone motif (which also appears on the opening track), this song has a manic and frenzied feel to it. This makes sense: the song was inspired by an episode of psychosis from a friend of von Hausswolff’s. She describes the “unstoppable … new weird brilliance” in the manner of her friend’s communication during this time, a description I feel definitely also applies to ICONOCLASTS.

ICONOCLASTS is an absolutely brilliant album. More sonically accessible than her earlier releases, it is a truly epic record in both length and complexity. The album is given all the space and time it needs to truly develop as you listen to it, and the same can be said for each individual song. Relentlessly and hypnotically moving forward, listening to this is a truly epic and cinematic experience that is absolutely worth the well over an hour long runtime.

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