'Paradise Rot' feels like a synesthetic translation of Jenny Hval's inner world, the origin of her most recent music work. Written before making her most prominent albums such as 'Innocence is Kinky', 'Apocalypse, girl' or 'Blood Bitch', everything that would later define her style is present in her writing. It's the story of a sexual awakening in a foreign country, a fearful tantalizing longing for proximity and exploration, an attempt to pierce through a thick layer of isolation. Hval's writing is sharp, crisp. The words sculpt in a meticulous way polymorphous environments pulsating, dreams and nightmares melting into one another, reality skewed by different emotional lenses; there is a disconcerting, addictive strangeness in how one feels when navigating these pages. Hval describes every detail acutely, but then situates them in a haze that feels claustrophobic, tightening slowly until the end. The experience felt overwhelming, delicious, ungraspable and hypnotizing.