Every great album should come with a jumpscare. A moment that makes you stumble a little on a run, stop short on a walk, and jerk your head up when blasting it at home. On Anna von Hausswolff’s phenomenal new album ICONOCLASTS, that jumpscare comes in the form of Iggy Pop’s craggy, trembling bellow, loudly breaking through the floating ether of the waterlogged love song, “The Whole Woman.” The instant Iggy’s recognizable baritone, sounding like a phlegmy late-stage Johnny Cash, croaks, my eyes pop and my body jolts, even though I know to anticipate it. As the song continues, Iggy’s voice settles into the duet, carefully wrapping around Anna’s as she questions if she can expose herself entirely, and finishes with his wonderful warbling of the concluding erotic line, “unleash your seas on me.” Still, I’m ready to leap out of my skin every time I hear Iggy, which has been a lot considering I’ve listened to the album on repeat since its release by Year0001.

Part of the reason Pop’s presence is so startling has to do with the overwhelming feminine energy of the prior song: the 11-minute “The Iconoclast.” “The Iconoclast” is a rush of pounding, orchestral momentum with speeding woodwinds, dramatic strings, pressing drums, Otis Sandsjö’s ever-present saxophone, and von Hausswolff’s own organ working together to create an elevated velocity, mirroring von Hausswolff’s lyrical image of “flying over mountains.” After a devil or savior bargaining, “Can I be your dream? Can I change your life?” the song soars through an odyssey of idol shattering as von Hausswolff’s voice wails and, in one memorable case, painfully gutturally screams (another jumpscare) as she knocks down love, the states (is she talking about US?!), apostles from the past, and anger in favor of freedom. The music mirrors this shattering, at times screeching to a halt or crashing and crumbling down like an avalanche of noise. Frequently, von Hausswolff’s voice is multiplied into a choir of clones, culminating in a chanted choral conclusion asking, “Can I protect you, Godly creation?” This gathering of female voices, even if it is just von Hausswolff’s, feels like a matriarchal Swedish cult straight out of Midsommar, and just as cathartic as that communal scream therapy. After this wholly feminine world, Pop’s gruff, gravelly masculine voice is a surprising, if still welcome guest.

Iggy, though, doesn’t account for the only shocker on the album. In fact, the entire album is a bit of a shocker itself, an unexpected break from von Hausswolff’s prior catalogue. The most obvious shift is that von Hausswolff, mostly, moves her characteristic doomy pipe organ into the background alongside collaborator and co-producer Filip Leyman’s synths, percussion, and the other instruments, foregrounding, instead, fellow Swede Sandsjö’s weird and wild sax. Sandsjö’s prominent role is introduced immediately with “The Beast,” on which his maddening woodwind melody fades into an oppressive, all-encompassing soup of dissonance, making sure listeners remember this is still a von Hausswolff album, before meandering into a woeful Lynch/Badalamenti-ian Black Lodge sax croon. The same melody from “The Beast” reappears later for “Struggle with the Beast,” a groovy, seemingly accurate (as far as I can figure) evocation of the experience of a psychotic break, the internal manic boogie that I imagine people rattling around on the subway are hearing. Maybe one day I’ll find out! Though these are particularly sax-forward tracks, Sandsjö’s playing weaves through the entire album, sometimes subtly and other times rising over more conventional, even poppier songs like “Stardust.” This makes the album sound like a strange and compelling mix of experimental jazz and goth nihilism that I haven’t heard since David Bowie’s transcendent interplanetary send-off, Blackstar.

This is a big shift from von Hausswolff’s earlier albums, like 2018’s Dead Magic or 2015’s The Miraculous, both of which give the feeling of sitting in a dusty, stuffy, airless, abandoned, rubbled church, covered in spider webs and spilled wax from long spent votive candles. In contrast, Sandsjö’s presence lends an airy quality, sometimes quite literally, as you can hear his breathing in several songs, interspersed with von Hausswolff’s own hyperventilating at the beginning of “The Iconoclast” and “The Mouth.” ICONOCLASTS also has a constant forward motion, driven by prominent drums and percussion on several songs like “Stardust” and “The Iconoclast.” This perfectly meshes with the oblique lyrical themes of moving past, well, something, whether relationships, expectations, idols, language, or even time itself, as on the haunting, “An Ocean of Time,” in which von Hausswolff dreamily repeats, “An ocean of time is not what we have,” over Abul Mogard’s mysterious, spinning ambient electronics. Maybe von Hausswolff felt like, after 2020’s All Thoughts Fly, a grim and gorgeous all-instrumental celebration of the pipe organ played on a replica of a 17th-century German baroque organ, that she worked the Gothic cathedral sound as much as possible. No matter what the reason for shifting up the sound, it’s responsible for von Hausswolff making one of the most exciting albums of the year. I’d say the most, if not for Ethel Cain’s Perverts and Willoughby Tucker, I Will Always Love You. Cain also appears here in “Aging Young Women,” which, with its cinematic strings and Cain’s crisp vocal clarity, sounds like a Lana Del Rey song if she stayed in that tunnel under Ocean Boulevard rather than disappeared into the trad wife country swamps.

I realize the comparison to Lana may stun some prior fans of von Hausswolff, whose menacing yowls and yelps on previous albums are more easily compared to Diamanda Galás or Lingua Ignota than our Lady of Southern California. But that doesn’t mean that von Hausswolff has softened. Sure, “Facing Atlas,” with its fairy bells and ecstatic sonic eruption à la Perfume Genius’s No Shape, is possibly the most “accessible” song I’ve heard from von Hausswolff, but the song still has misanthropically relatable lines like, “The world is full of shit and full of evil.” The more listener-friendly songs, like “Fractured Atlas” and “Stardust,” are also balanced out by instances of nervous, frenzied, and noisy collapse. I mean, this is still the same experimental musician who has opened for Swans. Take the conclusion of “The Mouth,” in which the thick cacophony of tooting sax, percussion, and a choir of her own frantic calls of “I need some help to control myself” waves from one monitor to the next before disintegrating into a chaotic pre-lingual blathering that reminds me of Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter speaking in tongues. Plus, von Hausswolff can still howl with the best of them, audible on “The Mouth” with the wide open “The sky opens up,” and the shriek of “I’m fucked up in the head” on “Struggle with the Beast.”

And it’s not as if von Hausswolff puts the pipe organ down entirely. When the imposing instrument emerges from the dense wall of sound, it feels like a triumph. This occurs on the codependence anthem “Unconditional Love,” a duet with Anna’s sister Maria von Hausswolff that brings us back to that musty church with an ominous warning of an apocalyptic fall, a theme explored on the first song, “The Truth, The Glow, The Fall,” from her 2018 album Dead Magic. As a Klaus Nomi fanatic, as well as someone who apparently talks enough about the end of days that ChatGPT solely suggests apocalyptic essay topics for this website, any song about a tumble from heaven or to hell just gets me. While Nomi’s “After the Fall” is quite cheery about a post-nuclear wasteland in which we’ll be born, born, born again, even if we’re glowing mutants, von Hausswolff details a love so fixed, or fixated, that it’ll either survive catastrophe—or quite possibly cause it! Like the album as a whole, “Unconditional Love” is explosive, expansive, and a pinch exhausting. This makes the chilliest song on the album, the final “Rising Legends,” an ambient, thumping swell that sounds as if Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’s Mars soundtrack also included doom jazz, a welcome, if spooky, reprieve. I only wish it had gone on for about 45 more minutes.