Aurora, from Bring Me The Horizon to the new band with Tom Rowlands

There are encounters that seem to have been written elsewhere where music is not just sound but impulse. And so comes the union between Aurora and Tom Rowlands of the Chemical Brotherswhich today manifests itself in the new band TOMORA and in the single “Ring the alarm”, a digital discharge that opens like a cosmic alarm and expands into a race, where the ethereal voice of the Norwegian singer-songwriter emerges like a primordial call immersed in the bright fuchsia of the video clip directed by Adam Smith. It is a partnership that feels the urgency of becoming a single body: “We wanted to be a band, not two individuals. It is our musical feeling that comes to life”, underlined the two artists when presenting their project, condensing the idea that music can be a living material, a territory where alienity and instinct dance with open arms.

Aurora Aksnes, simply Aurora for the public, arrives at this new chapter after having built a bright and lateral career of his owndaughter of a sensitivity that avoids overexposure and prefers oblique areas where the imagination boils. From the debut of “All my Demons greet me as a friend” (2016), to the luminous and ritual exploration of “A different kind of human” (2019), up to the international success of “The gods we can touch” (2022), the musician’s path has been a crescendo of sound visions. Mixing art-pop, Nordic folk and synth pulsations that intertwine like roots in water, she herself says that music has always been an internal voice that is difficult to ignore, a “noise in the mind” that accompanies her everywhere, and that feeds on vast influences, from Björk to Leonard Cohen, from Gojira to the Beatles, without ever becoming imitation.

His artistic universe has always been nourished by encounters with other worlds thanks to the many collaborations with Jacob Collier, Wu Qing-feng, Sondre Lerche, Askjell, Tom Odell, Hans Zimmer. One of the most impactful moments arrives in 2024when he lends his voice and his writing to Bring Me The Horizon in “Limousine”one of the most emotional songs from their 2024 album “Post human: Nex Gen” (read our review here). The duet with the British band led by Oliver Sykes, suspended between delicacy and pain, not only catapulted Aurora to a wider international audience, but testifies to how much her timbre is able to insinuate itself into even the roughest universes without losing its purity.

Among the most significant collaborations, however, is the one with the Chemical Brothers occupies a special place. The electronic duo first worked with Aurora when she provided guest vocals on their 2019 album “No Geography“. As told by the artist herself, everything was born from an email from Rowlands in which he confessed to her: “Hi, I’m Tom and I like your musicyour words and I would like you to write something with us for our next album”. She has never hidden that she considers the Chemical Brothers among her favorite artists: “I have always loved the Chemical Brothers, since I was a spermatozoon…I love dancing to their songs. They have a certain courage”, Aurora told NME, who added to the email received from Tom: “I was really excited and I had to wait about a week because I had to choose the right words for my answer to explain how happy I was so they knew how much I wanted to be a part of their music.”

Also famous is the anecdote in which the Norwegian musician said she asked Rowlands to “vomit regurgitation” on one of her songs, and how he enthusiastically accepted, working for hours. Tomora, in this sense, is the natural consequence of an agreement that had long been asking for its own space to expand.

The result is now presented by the first single “Ring the alarm”, a song that seems to arise from a collision between the percussive spirit of the Chemical Brothers and the vocal enchantment of Auroraa digital siren that calls together and inaugurates a new, mysterious, hungry project. A beginning that confirms what Aurora represents today, among the most visionary and unpredictable figures of contemporary popcapable of bringing together Scandinavian folklore, acid electronics, introspective poetry and transversal collaborations, always following a personal compass that points towards a single direction, that of authenticity.