Aurora – Your Blood Review

With one of the best albums of the year just gone by, Aurora, with her Mario Kart-sounding single and joyously gothic pop recollections is back with Your Blood. Facing off against single after single, the bags under your eyes getting heavier and the band of stress around your brain tightening, there is no better way to get back to it than with Aurora. An evidently, thankfully exceptional piece from the Norwegian singer-songwriter cements her quality further still. Repetition, soulful beats and a bit more guitar give Aurora a neat tie between her release last year and whatever is to come next. Your Blood strikes, more and more, as a transitionary single which does well to test the waters of a new experience. 

Her alt-pop experiences are still the freshest of the bunch. It does not get much better than the work Aurora provides. Well-pitched, intense and exciting. Those are the three essentials Aurora so often brings to the table with her music and while the percussion-heavy endings are a surprise for the ears, they are a welcome new turn. It is not as though Your Blood removes the impact The Gods We Can Touch had, though there is a freshness to this new single. At a push, Your Blood could have featured on said album, though the bar was high considering the consistencies of those album-oriented singles. What Your Blood provides then is an exceptional, continual beat with reflective lyrics embedded throughout. Aurora would have her listeners reflect, as she did with The Gods We Can Touch, on how they can change themselves for the better.  

Detailing how to outrun yourself, Your Blood considers the possibility, deep down, of real change being possible. Beyond its sharp reasonings and laments comes a strong instrumental range which coasts over with real and pure energy to it. Much of that comes from Aurora’s voice though, which is as stellar as it always is. With a sense of dejection sprinkled throughout the need and desire to question your own motivation, Your Blood holds firm with a rising and repeatable guitar riff. Settle in nicely and conjure up some real, rising vocal work from Aurora who brings about rebellious, almost optimistic achievements of refusing to die. Her repetition here is paramount to the success of bloody reflection and stubbornness against death.  

Paired with a lighter guitar flourish than first expected – the moodiness of the album before this not replicated – Aurora presents Your Blood as the transitioning period from record to record. A little lenient on which instrumentals fit in where, the tech explosion toward the end, the ethereal vocals, it strips back a layer presented on The Gods We Can Touch, and for good reason. A sense of vulnerability sprinkles through this – the iconography as straightforward as can be, unlike the high bar set by the singles of her latest record. It provides a great difference then, and Your Blood cements itself as a quality single, powered by a sense of purity in the face of constant temptation. Assess your worth, and refuse to die. Aurora has set a high bar once more.