And so we journey back to Scandinavia for today’s music. This time our travels take us to Norway to meet Aurora Aksnes, known as AURORA who is a singer, songwriter, and record producer who was born in Stavanger. Aurora is the only musician in her family. She started learning to play piano when she was six. “I really love classic music, and when I found this piano in the attic, I just started pressing the keys and trying to figure out my favorite classical songs. I started to make melodies that I recognized. There was something special about being able to play just by yourself – something about the emotion in it made me want to continue playing.”
She spent her first three years in Hole, a small town where her parents, had lived for 15 years. In her house in Høle, Aurora developed her taste for nature, singing and traditional clothing, such as long skirts and hats. Later the family moved farther north in western Norway, to a house in the woodlands of the Os mountains, a remote municipality in Hordaland, near Bergen. Aurora has described this place as “There are almost no cars and the roads are small and bumpy and there are lots of trees everywhere, it’s very quiet and the internet is bad.” She has also compared it to the fictional land of Narnia. At age nine, when she had a better handle of the English language, she began writing songs. Her first original composition was titled “I Had A Dream”, which referred to how hard the world can be.
Aurora’s first track, “Puppet”, was released in December 2012, followed by her second, “Awakening”, in May 2013. Her first single signed to her labels Glass note Records and Decca Records, “Under Stars” was released in November 2014, and “Runaway” followed in February 2015.
Her second single, “Running with the Wolves” was released in April 2015. She appeared at summer festivals such as Way Out West, Wilderness, and Green Man. Aurora’s third single, “Murder Song (5, 4, 3, 2, 1)”, was released in September 2015 and has received continued support in national press, on national radio and popular online music blogs. Aurora performed at the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize Concert. She has played a sold-out headline show in London and supported Of Monsters and Men in Brixton in November 2015.
Aurora recorded a cover of the Oasis track “Half the World Away” for the 2015 John Lewis Christmas advert. Her next single, titled “Conqueror”, was released in January 2016, and a music video was uploaded the following month. Her debut album, All My Demons Greeting Me as a Friend, was released on in March 2016, receiving generally positive reviews from critics. After releasing it, she went on to embark on her European tour, making a number of visits to the UK in between.
When the album debuted, Aurora said that it was “the first album of many”. In March 2016, Aurora made her American television debut on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, performing “Conqueror”.
As of May 2016, after coming back from her European tour, the singer announced that she was ready to begin writing and producing more material, which will form her second studio album. She stated in a Facebook event that she has fifteen demo songs and has written a thousand songs/poems. Since the announcement, Aurora has released “I Went Too Far” as a single. A music video for the track was released in July 2016.
In September 2018, the singer released the first half of her second album on EP format, under the title Infections of a Different Kind (Step 1). The EP features eight songs, and the title itself comes from the eighth track included on it, which Aurora declared as “the most important song I’ve ever written”. A Different Kind of Human (Step 2) followed in June 2019, with lead singles “Animal” and “The River”.
On 4 November 2019, the soundtrack to the Disney film Frozen II was released, with Aurora providing backing vocals on the song “Into the Unknown”. In February 2020, she performed the song onstage as part of the 92nd Academy Awards. She released her solo version of this song in March 2020. Aurora released in May 2020 “Exist For Love”, which was presented as her first love song ever with a self-directed music video. The song was made during the COVID-19 lockdown in collaboration with Isobel Waller-Bridge, who composed the string arrangements. It was the first glimpse into what she described as “a new era” in her career, with the upcoming release of a new album.
