A review essay of All My Demons Greeting Me as a Friend (Deluxe) by AURORA. Decca and Glassnote Records, 2016.

AURORA’s debut album is a hauntingly beautiful look at nature, humanity, finding one’s place in the world, and what it means to be alive. AURORA’s high, pure vocals and uniquely breathtaking production give the music a dreamlike quality and evoke a wide range of emotion with each song, establishing AURORA’s signature sound and her authenticity and versatility as an artist. We begin our journey into this album with AURORA’s breakthrough song “Runaway.” 

“Runaway” is, without a doubt, the song for which AURORA is best known. Written when she was only eleven years old, the song serves as both the mesmerizing introduction to AURORA’s debut studio album and as a fitting introduction to her signature sound and her deep, introspective lyricism. The song achieves a fascinating juxtaposition of softness and intensity, with the opening verse feeling dark and urgent when placed in comparison with the soaring second chorus. The song tells a story of escapism, searching for something and yearning to learn about all that the world has to offer, only to realize that when there is nowhere left to run, the safest place to go is home. There is a childlike wonder to the song through its lyrical descriptions of dreams and visions in the sand, as well as in the hopeful tone of the musical production. “Runaway’s” original music video features AURORA in various seasons, most notably running through a forest in the winter. This video provides a cinematic and beautifully filmed reflection of the song’s lyrical meaning and sets the tone for the theme of nature that would go on to influence much of AURORA’s music going forward. What I love most about “Runaway” is its atmospheric production and the way that AURORA’s lyricism somehow captures both a youth and maturity and deals with the deeply relatable juxtaposition between wanting to escape and wanting to go home. I also was drawn to the unique and creative melodies used within the song, something that remains true for me throughout the entire album.

AURORA takes us next into a song called “Conqueror,” a sonically upbeat, continually-building chronicle of a world that is falling apart and a narrator who is awaiting a hero who never arrives. AURORA seems to be encouraging the listener to find the hero within themselves, asserting that no one is coming to save us and that we are all that we have. This message speaks to the theme of AURORA trying to make others understand that hope and change have to come from within us. In “Running with the Wolves,” AURORA explores a natural instinct and calls out humanity for the harm it has done to the rest of the natural world, stating that “[…] we’re running out of time” to reverse the damage that we’ve done and, it would seem, to enjoy the world that we are in (Running with the Wolves 0:26). “Lucky” is a song which contains dark haunting verses, which are followed by a brighter-sounding chorus (a powerful element of much of AURORA’s production). Here she describes a brush with death and how her mental health has been impacted by the experiences she has lived through: 

War inside my mind

Behind my eyes it’s coming down

And for the thousandth time

I feel too numb to even mind (Lucky 1:31)

She sings about how she must let go of the past. She sings about how she must look to the life that she is lucky to be living. 

There remains a consistent thread of the theme of life: being alive, staying alive, and what living truly means. AURORA continues to write about this idea, as well as other throughlines such as nature and dreams in “Winter Bird.” Through melodies that are at once chilling and breathtakingly beautiful, AURORA sings “All I need is to remember / How it was to feel alive”(Winter Bird 1:09). The song contains atmospheric production and layered background vocals, ending with an outro of isolated vocals. It brought to my attention that one common motif throughout the album is that of a boat . AURORA mentions waiting for, floating in, or building a boat in numerous songs on the album including “Winter Bird,” “Warrior,” “Running with the Wolves,” and “Black Water Lillies.” Her mentions of traversing seas and writing a lot about water in songs such as “Runaway” in addition to those previously mentioned adds depth to the nature-centric backdrop that the album seems to take on in both its messaging and accompanying visual elements. 

“I Went Too Far” is a song that has been in my personal rotation for six years now, and I remember immediately connecting to it the first time I heard it. It is a song about losing yourself in pursuit of the approval and love of someone else, and AURORA sings about regretting that pursuit and realizing that she should have been finding love and acceptance within herself: 

I’m left behind with an empty hole 

And everything I am is gone

I tried to reach for another soul

So I can feel whole (I Went Too Far 2:09)

The album continues with a song called “Through the Eyes of a Child,” which truly seems like a thesis statement for this cohesive project. The song is deeply emotional and has the most stripped-back production out of any song–excluding the acoustic versions of songs–on the deluxe version of All My Demons Greeting Me as a Friend. This song features a piano and AURORA’s voice, which sings

World is covered by our trails

Scars we cover up with paint

Watch them preaching sour lies

I would rather see this world through the eyes of a child (Through the Eyes of a Child 0:05)

In this song, AURORA mourns the innocence of childhood and longs for the hope and beauty with which a child tends to view the world around them. She once again alludes to the idea of being/feeling alive when she amends the titular line of the song to say “I would rather feel alive with a childlike soul” (2:20). There are relatively few lyrics to the song; almost half of it is vocal ad-libbing as the production swells, culminating in the final line of the song: “Please don’t leave me here” (4:13). Rather than being able to see the destruction and corruption wreaked upon the world by humans, AURORA wishes that she could return to the sheltered hope and innocence of a child. This is an idea that connects directly to the next song, “Warrior,” in which she sings, “I cry for the world, for everyone […] / I can’t recall the last time / I opened my eyes to see the world as beautiful” (Warrior 0:11). Over what is probably the most in-your-face production on the album thus far, “Warrior” is a call to action, encouraging the audience to “Let love conquer your mind / Warrior, warrior, / Just reach out for the light” (0:38). AURORA refers to herself within the song as a “Warrior of love” (3:02), which is why this song seems to encapsulate yet another main idea of this album; portraying love as an act of war… a bold act of resistance. AURORA is trying to convey that there is light as long as there is love, and that this is the answer to the crises we face: 

Underneath darkened skies 

There’s a light kept alive

Let love conquer your mind (2:14)

“Murder Song (5,4,3,2,1)” is about a man mercifully killing the narrator of the song in order to spare her from the bad things that life will hold, and the lyrics seem to convey a sort of acceptance or understanding of the man’s motivation behind this act. It is clear that he does not want to have to kill her, but must do so in order to shield her from the harm that will be done by life. “Murder Song” is followed by “Home,” a song that speaks to the human condition and the hope that one day we will truly be alive instead of surviving. Adding to the album’s themes of life, hope, and dreams, AURORA sings in “Home,”

One day life will be kind 

We are not alive

We are surviving every time

We are not alive

Only dreams inside our minds (Home 0:15)

The song contains a line that talks about humans being “Wrapped inside a cocoon made of flesh and bones” (1:51) which I understood as a reference to, or perhaps an inspiration for, the album’s cover, which features Aurora as a moth-like creature wrapped in a kind of cocoon. In a 2016 interview for Coup de Main Magazine, AURORA confirmed my theory of this line inspiring the album art: “That line did inspire the album cover a lot […] I’m just imagining life being like a cocoon, you are working on becoming yourself more and more each day, the older you get, because that’s what ageing is, it’s becoming the person you are meant to be. You learn and you grow, and it’s a nice image” (Riddell). The process that AURORA describes here is something that every person goes through, and I find it to be fitting in a song about the collective human experience of dreams and survival.

“Under the Water” and “Black Water Lillies” are connected very closely in my mind due to their similar imagery and subject matter. If “Under the Water” felt like a storm, with its dark urgency and existential lyricism, then “Black Water Lillies” sounded more like the morning after it… calmer and sonically lighter, but still discussing the act of diving into deep all-consuming waters. “Under the Water” speaks of isolation, evoking imagery of dark and silent waters as AURORA describes,

So many souls that lost control

Where did they fall?

Into the deep, what do they seek? (Under the Water 0:52)

After she sings of the water washing away sins, she describes going under the water in “Black Water Lillies” hand-in-hand with someone else. She sings,

Arms are reaching for

My arms, I can see no more

We dance as we float around

We head towards the ocean floor (Black Water Lillies 1:47)

AURORA ends the song with the lines “I am warm / Falling down / I am reborn” (3:08), connecting the song further to the idea of rebirth via water. The last few songs on the album include “Half the World Away,” which ties in more to the theme of escapism that is introduced in the first track of the album. AURORA sings about wanting to leave the town that she lives in in order to achieve her dreams and goals. The song is followed by an acoustic version of “Murder Song (5,4,3,2,1),” which contains only an acoustic guitar, AURORA’s vocal, and one other voice, and a cover of Nat King Cole’s “Nature Boy,” in which the narrator learns that “ ‘The greatest thing you’ll ever learn / Is to love and be loved in return’ ” (Nature Boy (Acoustic) 1:59) The inclusion of this song further cements the idea that the primary message of this album is love. “Wisdom Cries” comes next; it is a song about how humanity has destroyed itself and has squandered its own progress and purpose by hurting the world and one another: 

We go running

Way back in time

Through diamond eyes

We gotta go back to the start (Wisdom Cries 0:42)

The background vocals are high and piercing, emphasizing the urgency of the message, and the song serves as yet another reminder that we are running out of time to amend our mistakes. The song discusses a sense of emergency, and the idea is that wisdom, personified in the song, cries and mourns upon witnessing the atrocities of humankind. The last song on the deluxe version of the album–the Pablo Nouvelle remix of “Running with the Wolves,”–almost serves as an end credits to the album, focusing on the repetition of the line that says “But we’re running out of time” (Running with the Wolves (Pablo Nouvelle Remix) 2:49). This is even a kind of prelude to future AURORA music in which nature and the treatment of it by humanity remains a major theme.

All My Demons Greeting Me as a Friend is a cohesive body of work that truly captures AURORA’s sound and message as an artist, and while each song is distinct and unique, they all still carry that signature, ethereal sound and connect to convey the deeper themes of the album. My personal experience of this album was very impactful; each song seemed to embody, and therefore evoke, a viscerally emotional reaction from me in regards to the wider concepts AURORA is writing about on this album: among them being nature, hope, humanity, community, anxiety, urgency, mental illness, fear, and yearning. For me, this album truly captured the essence of the complexity of being human, and I resonated deeply with the overarching idea that the answer to the crisis and chaos of life is the courageous act of love. While some may find this solution cliche, I believe it served as a much-needed reminder to hold love along with fear, with anger, with pain; a call not to ignore the darkness of the world, but to let the “light” of living and loving and being human exist along with it and, ultimately, combat it. AURORA’s debut record is a project that I will be thinking about frequently in the weeks to come, and I believe that it very effectively sets the stage for the rest of her musical career to follow.