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.
ALBUM REVIEWS
The leather jackets and skinny jeans worn by Noah Dillon and Chandler Ransom Lucy have become something of a signature, and the pair have hovered around the edges of the pop worlds in New York and Los Angeles for quite some time. First highlighted by NME during the Dimes Square resurgence in 2023, The Hellp have gradually stepped away from their earlier indie-sleaze imitation and leaned into something far more thoughtful. Their wild, neon-tinged party vibe has been traded for a more cinematic electronic approach that still holds onto a confident, self-aware attitude.
Dillon and Lucy started releasing music as The Hellp in 2016, with early mixtapes rooted in the chaotic nights and carefree behaviour once associated with NYC’s indie-sleaze staples like LCD Soundsystem and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Over time, though, they’ve earned a steadily growing respect from critics. That rise has come through both their underground gigs, which have included a show at London’s Corsica Studios with Fakemink as support, and through Dillon’s expanding visual work that recently reached Rosalía’s ‘LUX’ album and a pair of music videos for 2hollis.
As ‘Riviera’ approached release, the duo shared: “We knew our next project would need to be a bit more mature… we refuse to become stagnant. ‘Riviera’ is more solemn, restrained and impassioned than anything we’ve done before.” The finished album feels like Dillon and Lucy carefully balancing identity and openness, theatricality and direct emotion.
The lead release, ‘Country Road’, carries a late-night heaviness, the kind of confession you would quietly tell a friend in a club’s smoking area. Its lonely tone is surrounded by glitching electronics and a rising bridge that points to the exhaustion that follows endless nights out. Tracks like ‘New Wave America’ and ‘Cortt’ deepen what the duo mention in their liner notes as a “desperate story of the disparate Americana.” Both pieces broaden the album’s emotional landscape and offer clear-eyed commentary on reluctantly stepping into adulthood.
When ‘Riviera’ shifts into ‘Doppler’, the tone brightens for a moment as hopeful synths lift Dillon’s words about yearning and heartbreak into an emotional peak. And in the final moments of the record, The Hellp land on something instantly familiar to anyone who has drifted away from the club scene. The Kavinsky-like opening of ‘Here I Am’ nods to their early inspirations, while the closing track ‘Live Forever’ arrives with a slow, grounded maturity, built around Dillon repeating the line: “I don’t want to live forever.”
‘Riviera’ holds far less disorder than The Hellp’s earlier releases. This turn inward marks an important risk for a duo once fuelled by the momentum of a downtown New York comeback. By easing off the frenzy, The Hellp have stepped out of the party’s lingering haze and returned with a style that feels more refined and more aware of itself than anything they have created before.
