The song "Heaven" by Jenny Hval is a reflection on the narrator's past and present relationship with religion and femininity. The lyrics describe the narrator's experience growing up in a religious community and feeling disconnected from her own femininity. She has since distanced herself from that community, but at the age of 33, she is drawn back to the idea of singing religiously and finding a connection to something higher than herself. The chorus, "O, Heaven, O, Heaven," is a yearning for spiritual transcendence, but it is juxtaposed with the image of a graveyard of girls. This suggests that the narrator sees traditional notions of femininity and religiosity as suffocating, confining, and ultimately leading to death. The graveyard could also represent the repressed desires and dreams of the women who came before her. The line, "I just want to feel so much death, a hole to nowhere," is a poetic expression of the narrator's desire to confront and embrace the dark, unknown aspects of life. She is seeking a radical transformation, one that involves confronting death and perhaps even embracing it. Overall, "Heaven" is a song that grapples with complex themes of gender, religion, mortality, and desire. It invites the listener to reflect on their own relationship with these ideas and to question the narratives we have been given about what it means to be a woman, to belong to a community, and to search for meaning.
