All My Demons Greeting Me As A Friend Aurora

• 1 Runaway 04:09
• 2 Conqueror 03:28
• 3 Running With The Wolves 03:15
• 4 Lucky 04:13
• 5 Winter Bird 04:04
• 6 I Went Too Far 03:28
• 7 Through The Eyes Of A Child 04:34
• 8 Warrior 03:43
• 9 Murder Song (5, 4, 3, 2, 1) 03:20
• 10 Home 03:33
• 11 Under The Water 04:25
• 12 Black Water Lilies 04:43
• 13 Half The World Away 03:18
• 14 Murder Song (5, 4, 3, 2, 1) (Acoustic) 03:39
• 15 Nature Boy (Acoustic) 03:00
• 16 Wisdom Cries 04:07
• 17 Running With The Wolves (Pablo Nouvelle Remix) 03:50
• Total Runtime 01:04:49

Info for All My Demons Greeting Me As A Friend

The Norwegian singer-songwriter's debut is an exquisitely crafted record. All My Demons Greeting Me As A Friend is a somewhat convoluted name for an album as sharp and concise as Aurora's debut.

After breaking onto the Norwegian music scene at the tail-end of 2014, the singer's sweeping electro-pop quickly found itself a global audience. Now, with her debut album - after making the wise decision to drop a few of the older tracks to avoid the potential for staleness - Aurora has produced an exquisitely crafted record.

There's an eeriness lurking beneath the beauty of opening track, 'Runaway' - its cavernous clicks and echoes make themselves at home before it bursts into something warmer. Lyrically too, it's unsettling. Filtered through Aurora's native Norwegian tongue, the English language becomes something strange and new, as if - freed from grammatical trappings and learned cliche - she can twist it into new shapes and forms. "So many souls, that lost control / Where did they fall?" she asks on 'Under The Water', "And to the deep, what do they see?"

'I Went Too Far' drags the album's dark undertones to the surface. The disco-inflected cries of the song's chorus - "Give me some love and hold me tight" - are made infinitely more sinister by the verses that surround it: "I went too far when I was begging on my knees / When I cut my hands, so you could stand and watch me bleed."

There's a nordic folk song hiding in the bombast of 'Winter Bird' - one I wish she'd allowed to surface a little more - though its final shades, whose auto-tuned layers recall the best of Imogen Heap, pack a punch too. 'Murder Song (5,4,3,2,1)', meanwhile, has been tampered with since its original incarnation - as though it's escaped from her careful grasp, grazed past Mumford & Sons and David Guetta, and then been wrestled back into shape.

There's two levels to 'The Eyes Of A Child', and its shimmering beauty. The poignancy of its sentiment - "I would rather see this world through the eyes of a child" - is rendered somehow more affecting by the fact that Aurora is not yet out of her teens. Her nostalgia has arrived early, and made itself at home - but it's a pure, unjaded sort of nostalgia.

The whole album, in fact, wears its grand themes and melodrama with a lightness that can only have come from someone young and uncynical. It flits and flickers between extravagant highs and lows, but with such earnestness that its sweeping emotions are impossible to resist.

Aurora's is a wide-eyed sort of wisdom, and it's beautiful to behold. (Alexandra Pollard, Gigwise)

Aurora Aksnes, vocals
Alf Lund Godbolt, piano
Odd Martin Skålnes, bass guitar, guitar
Magnus Åserud Skylstad, drums
Selma Frida Stang, synthesizer
Silja Sol, synthesizer, backing vocalist
Ida Myking, backing vocalist

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