ALBUM REVIEWS
“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.”
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.
It is hard to overstate Megan Thee Stallion’s success: She is not just a rap star, but the kind of supercharged celebrity who appears in commercials and movies and hobnobs with pop stars, all while serving as the new flagbearer of Houston rap heritage. On MEGAN, her newest album, you can feel the pressure on her to keep all those plates spinning—to maintain momentum, to not fuck it up. After Tina Snow, the 2018 EP that cemented Megan as a rapper who’s as raunchy, funny, and charismatic as anyone, all of her full-length projects have, to varying degrees, felt like exercises in becoming everything to everyone. But it’s never been as distracting as it is on MEGAN, an uneven album so preoccupied with giving every single type of fan exactly what they want that it might as well be crowdsourced.
Do you share Megan’s infatuation with anime? Then you will get a thrill out of “Otaku Hot Girl,” which samples a song from Jujutsu Kaisen and features an intro from one of the show’s voice actors. Bankroll Got It’s drum-heavy flip of the soundtrack is uninteresting—though it’s not like he’s working with an anime renowned for its music—and the character references are earnest but unbearably corny. The better song that leans into her fondness for Japanese culture is the multilingual “Mamushi,” which pulls off the theme without flattening her personality. Maybe instead you need new Megan to play at your Pilates class: She’s got you with the feel-good “Worthy,” a Lizzo-coded pop song. Those muscles are put to more effective use on “Spin,” where the silky Victoria Monét hook complements aggressively flirty Megan verses. The fluffy finger-snap beat sounds like it could have been on Love/Hate. (Come to think of it, Megan would have ripped “Shawty Is Da Shit.”)
Then there are the songs for those deeply invested in Megan’s beefs and squabbles. I can picture fans gathering in group chats, dissecting subliminals and clues like they’re in an Agatha Christie book club. After the last three months, I’m all feuded out, so I’m less interested in that game. Still, she lands a few good jokes on “Hiss,” where she calls out the misogynistic dudes in rap who can’t keep her name out of their mouths. (Drake has had a one-sided vendetta toward her for a while now; Megan hits back with some BBL Drizzy theories of her own.) “Rattle,” which has a fast, groovy beat that melodic South Florida rappers would eat up, leaves a sting. “’Cause the niggas don’t beef with the niggas/They scared of each other, but beat on the women,” she attacks; she could be talking about a dozen different rappers, which makes the song feel like a sharp indictment of hip-hop culture in general. As critical as that line is, she still has fun chanting, “Ain’t got no tea on me, this ho’ think she TMZ” while hitting a Harley Quinn cackle in the background.
Megan doesn’t fool around like that enough. Even tracks made to light up the club feel as if they’re satisfying expectations. On the would-be party anthem “Where Them Girls At,” Megan reworks the nostalgic Facebook-era twerk sound of Kansas City’s Kstylis. She doesn’t add anything new to his style; I can only imagine how TisaKorean, a Houston native who is always having a good-ass time tinkering with the past, would have sauced it up. Megan loosens up alongside Glorilla on “Accent,” capturing the tipsy bounce she’s always had in freestyles and features, like Latto’s “Sunday Service” remix. When she’s in that mode, she’s incredibly funny. “That ain’t my bae, he really more like my bidet,” she raps on “B.A.S.,” a Teena Marie-sampling club drill experiment that works because she’s all in. She’s even got a whole song (“Down Stairs DJ”) about masturbating before she falls asleep—not unexpected from Megan, but silly in a way her best music can be, going back to “Big Ole Freak.”
For all my reservations about MEGAN, I do understand the pressures, especially in rap, where hitmaking women have historically been discarded quickly. Foxy Brown got caught in label purgatory after 2001’s Broken Silence wasn’t as huge as Def Jam hoped; Trina had dirt thrown on her name when she did her own thing away from Trick Daddy. The stories are endless. The fears are real. If Lil Baby drops an album that makes zero cultural impact, he can go back to the drawing board. If Megan does? Who knows. She’s not trying to find out. This reality isn’t just depressing on a systemic level, but also because of the effect it has on an artist like Megan Thee Stallion. Even for one of the most celebrated Texas rappers of her generation, nurturing a fanbase takes priority over the music because it feels like a matter of time until the hip-hop industry finds an excuse to turn its back.
