Album Review: All My Demons Greeting Me as a Friend by Aurora

There’s a strand of magic realism that’s typically European, focusing on the metaphysical and a sort of estrangement from the world. You’ll find it in the novels of Franz Kafka and Angela Carter – approached from entirely different worldviews, of course – an irreducible quality which can’t be explained by the general laws of nature, redefining the everyday via the fantastical. Nineteen year old Norwegian and native of Bergen AURORA Aksnes, AURORA to the pop music world, lives in this world.

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Steeped in gelid electronic textures, pulsing beats, and yearning modalities, Aurora's All My Demons Greeting Me as a Friend also blends vivid lyrical imagery with parts fantasy and heartache for a haunting full-length debut. The 12-track album by Norwegian singer and songwriter Aurora Aksnes includes two European charters from her prior EP, 2015's Running with the Wolves. Both gray-shaded numbers about being out of place, "Runaway" and "Running with the Wolves" turn out to be the average of what the substantial LP offers rather than standouts.

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Cast your mind back a few years, and you may remember a time when John Lewis didn’t officially own Christmas. Those days are long gone now, and every year the beginning of the festive season is marked by people sat at their laptops, tears streaming down their face while the heartwarming story of a child doing something nice for an older person, or an animal being cute or something, is soundtracked by a breathy, minor-key cover version of a much loved classic song. This year’s advert featured the delicate tones of Norwegian teenager Aurora Aksnes, who sang Half The World Away by Oasis while an old man living on the Moon spied on a little girl through a telescope (it’s less creepy than it sounds, kind of).

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Nineteen-year-old Aurora Aksnes, or AURORA, just released the highly anticipated follow up to her 2015 EP, Running With The Wolves. The Norwegian artist garnered critical acclaim following her EP release, gaining the attention of major labels, music critics, and even Katy Perry. The new 12-track full length album, All My Demons Greeting Me As A Friend, depicts a raw, real, and beautiful emotional journey with moments both of extreme power and unhindered vulnerability.

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There are few, fortunate artists able to tap into the magic of inter-webs adulation. Occasionally, there's a musician who can follow through on the promise of a few early, universally-acclaimed singles and translate that to genuine stardom. Here, 19-year-old Norwegian singer Aurora Aksnes makes her musical argument for sustained relevance. .

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Aurora - nineteen year-old Norwegian pop star Aurora Asknes - was given an almighty nudge towards stardom when she was handed the now-prestigous accolade of performing the track that appeared on 2015’s John Lewis Christmas advert, a cover of ‘Half The World Away’ by Oasis. While her debut album, ‘All My Demons Greeting Me As A Friend’, doesn’t signal the greatest departure from the the piano-led, squeaky clean Aurora that many were first faced with, it does contain a bite that it was hard to see coming. ‘Conqueror’ employs earth-shattering drums that allow her voice to float across the track like a battle cry.

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Like Ellie Goulding, Norwegian singer-songwriter Aurora Aksnes is a John Lewis artist, having lent her ethereal voice to the department store’s Christmas TV ad last year. Also like Goulding, Aurora makes coldly bombastic pop, but she is more given to angsty melodrama. Her debut’s dominant theme is that of violent submission, with Aurora variously looking for somebody to “conquer” her, kissing the ground beneath a love interest’s feet and being shot in the head by a man as a pre-emptive strike against life’s hardships.

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Fears and sorrows hold a radiant gleam on “All My Demons Greeting Me as a Friend,” the rapturous debut album by the 19-year-old Norwegian singer and songwriter Aurora. “Conqueror,” the single she released in February, opens with her singing, “Broken mornings, broken nights and broken days in between” and goes on to a chorus that proclaims her loneliness: ”I’ve been looking for the only one/But you don’t seem to come my way.” Yet the music nullifies any distress. The verses have a smiley lilt over a snappy backbeat, and the chorus marches with pealing major chords as Aurora’s voice multiplies all over the place: girl-group harmonies answered by oohs and oh-ohs and la-las and ya-yas.

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