AURORA – ‘What Happened To The Heart?’ review: a heavy, ravey call for humanity

10 June, 2024

AURORA, 2024. Credit: Press

“The world has grown so accustomed to being apathetic,” Norwegian alt-pop sensation AURORA told NME about the thought-process behind her fifth album, a record that asks: ‘What Happened To The Heart?’ Good news is scarce as we find ourselves in a seemingly constant doom spiral. The answer, as AURORA seeks to find, is within you. That lump beating in your chest that gives you life and pumps out the love that pulls you to others – we just need something dramatic to remind us. “Something needs to break apart,” she continued. “The least we can do is just keep being in touch with each other and ourselves.”

READ MORE: AURORA talks ‘What Happened To The Heart?’: “Apathy is the biggest enemy to progress”

What better way to connect than through bangers? “We’re good people and we both deserve peace,” she sings on the ecstatic Euro-pop of ‘Some Type Of Skin’ – a simple message that speaks profoundly to our times. With a monolithic chorus worthy of her fellow Scandis The Cardigans, ‘Your Blood’ pegs it across the dancefloor with the message that we’re just essentially all flesh and blood; with far more to bind than divide us. “Never give up on love,” she offers on the funk-infused ‘Do You Feel’. Here are more reasons not to.

Like Björk before her (and we should stress now that this is where the similarity ends), AURORA has often been plagued with this patronising image of being another “ethereal” Nordic witch. This, though, is a fiery record dealing in reality – dancing with the imps rather than away with the fairies. Album highlight ‘My Name’ pulses with a Trent Reznor groove – a flash of evil but all guts, balls and intent.

‘The Blade’ has a similar gnarliness with a touch of Massive Attack menace, while ‘My Body Is Not Mine’ climaxes is an apocalyptic rave wig-out, with a little help of Tom Rowlands from past collaborators The Chemical Brothers. Then there’s ‘Starvation’ – oosh – a tribal, out of body rave that begs the question “Why do we have to die, for us to see the light?” Why indeed? It’s pretty blinding right here.

“What is life worth living if you don’t bleed for anything?” she sings on the wuthering ‘To Be Alright’. Amen, and from an artist who’s gone the extra mile to make a a point with gusto. When NME asked Bring Me The Horizon’s Oli Sykes why he recruited her for ‘Limousine’ on the metal titans’ new album ‘Post Human: Nex Gen’, he told us: “AURORA for me is what a pop star should be, what the next wave of pop stars should look like; someone that has the songs, but is a real person who dares to speak what they believe in, who gives a shit about the world.”

Can music still change the world? At least AURORA is leading by example with a dazzling world of her own.