he Norwegian singer-songwriter Jenny Hval has more than dreamily gothic electronic alt-pop in her creative arsenal. In 2018, she released her first novel in English: Paradise Rot (Pitchfork called it “stunning”), and this month she follows it with Girls Against God. Featuring witches, schoolgirls and black metal, it is – according to publishers Verso – “a genre-warping, time-travelling horror novel-slash-feminist manifesto”, its opening line reading like the beginning of a particularly gnarly Hole album: “It’s 1990, and I’m the Gloomiest Child Queen.” Although drugs, booze and shagging-splattered memoirs are common in rock and pop – Mariah Carey, Lenny Kravitz, Skunk Anansie’s Skin and Judas Priest’s Rob Halford have all just released theirs, each with wildly differing takes on sex and substances – Hval is one of the few musicians to branch out into the world of literary fiction. For Hval, it is a sideline that makes total sense, working as an extension of her atmospheric sound and descriptive, inquisitive lyrics. But it’s not merely an escape from the taut word count of song, rather a way songwriters can dig into another area of their creativity. “I used to think that I wanted to combine [music and writing novels], but I don’t think there exists for me a combination as much as different ways of seeing things,” she told Nylon in 2018. It is this sort of literary brand extension that Hval has in common with the other musicians who have turned their brains to books, following the poetically inclined Nick Cave and Gil Scott-Heron, as well as Leonard Cohen, who began his career as a poet and author. Written while high on amphetamines on the Greek island of Hydra, Cohen’s 1966 book Beautiful Losers is now considered a cult classic, but at the time was branded “verbal masturbation” by critics. The less said of Morrissey’s 2015 effort List of the Lost the better, a novel whose one redeeming feature was winning the Literary Review’s Bad Sex award thanks to its “bulbous salutation” scene. For whatever reason – and we can think of a few – female musician-authors such as Hval seem a rarer breed, but there are some notable outliers. Following Sleeper’s Britpop heyday, frontwoman Louise Wener released the High Fidelity-esque Goodnight Steve McQueen in 2002. Sadly we are still yet to see Grimes’s debut novel, which she once told NME would be a smutty sci-fi epic. “I was stuck in a hotel room: I didn’t have a mic and I couldn’t record music and I didn’t have drugs, so I started writing porn!” she explained in 2012. “It’s filthy, but it’s more like a romance novel.” Here’s hoping that time off from touring has offered her a chance to finally finish it and give us something a bit different to get stuck into for the inevitable 2021 lockdown.