"When I listen deep, I'm not my owner," Jenny Hval sings towards the end of her new album Classic Objects. "Maybe I never was." It's a concept the experimental Norwegian artist has explored again and again in her complex but playful body of work, matching dark synth-pop with lyrics that explore academic ideas about liberation and the self. On her 2015 album Apocalypse, girl, she wrestled cynically with "self-care" and feminist empowerment that ends with individual consumption; on 2019's The Practice of Love, she slipped in recorded conversations about being a childless woman in your 30s, and the realization that one is not "the main character" of life, but rather a "talking tree" or "witch."