“I think it feels the same as an ocean in my veins”
A few months ago, Aurora brought us her latest album The Gods We Can Touch. Inspired by the flawed Greek Gods, and the nature of everything around us (including humans) she wrote fifteen songs for this album that represent the beauty of life on earth. In this review I’ll be going through some of them, showing you how the songs contribute to this idea (or not).
The album opens with a tune called “The Forbidden Fruits of Eden”. I would rather call this a composition instead of a song, because there’s no lyrics in there. It seems like it’s a short introduction to the album, showing the listener the right mindset to get in before listening. It contains a peaceful melody, bringing rest to the human mind. According to the Bible, the garden of Eden was the place where humanity on earth started, and it only lasted for a short time there, just like it’s now the tune the album starts with, very short but with a heavenly beautiful sound.
The first actual song is “Everything Matters”. This song is a collab with the French singer Pomme, and also the very first collab Aurora has ever put on an album. The album directly starts with something in which we can hear Aurora’s personality, because the lyric “everything matters to me” is something you’ll also notice if you watch any interview with her. The lyrics in this song show the things in nature that matter, along with the ‘you’ this song is talking about. The French part at the end goes deeper into how the ’you’ person matters. The melody is just floating around a little, maybe like a car on a peaceful country road.The car the “I” person is driving in the beginning of the song. The song begins with the lyric: “I’m driving your car with you sleeping on the seat next to me”. This is one of the more energetic tracks on the album, just like the second one, “Giving In To The Love”.
This song is very powerful, there’s a lot of percussion throughout the whole track, giving it a lot of energy and party vibes. According to Aurora herself, she wrote this song to remind people to stay connected to themselves and their beauty within, instead of just trying to make their outside look ‘better’. I think that the lyrics in this song represent this intention very well, and the general energetic vibe shows that this is a happy thing, making it a very fun track to listen and dance to.
Somewhat further in the album we get a more serious, yet energetic tone. The fifth track on this album is called “You keep me Crawling”. According to Aurora it’s about humans being used to being obedient to someone. From a very young age we learn that we should obey our parents, so this idea is kind of baked in our brains. The song also talks about how most religions nowadays only have one God and the people should obey Them, because They are perfect. In this song Aurora sings about throwing this out of the window and just giving in to the love, which has a lot to do with the main theme of this album. As she explains in her latest NME interview, she kind of longs back to the time where God was everywhere, in every thing there was to be loved, and this song explains why she thinks that (as far as I know Aurora isn’t religious, she didn’t speak about this in public).
After this we get “Exist For Love”, a song that was already out for a while before the album came out and the very song that I listened to the most according to my Spotify Wrapped from 2021. A very sappy song, which is a totally different tone from what we’ve heard before. I think the very clear beat in this song may even present the rhythm of a human heart, which is very connected to the feeling of love; the exact thing the entire song describes. This track has an amazing flow, perfect for a slow dance.
A few songs further we get back with the energetic partying. The track is called “The Innocent” and it’s about how perfection is dangerous, and humans seem to be too obsessed with perfection. The storyline on Spotify tells us again that Aurora wants to worship something flawed, instead of perfect. This song plays into that by the lyrics being about thoughts of not being good enough for someone else, which is certainly a very real thought in this life.
This is followed by the song “Exhale Inhale”. The title made me expect a moment of rest on the album, but it’s more about asking for help than resting. This is again a message to be brave, because asking for help is very hard. The song sounds a tiny bit stressful, exactly like a situation in which you want to ask for help. There are little vocalized parts in the song, referring back to “Everything Matters”, I think it’s a very nice touch to connect the two songs like this.
The last song I want to talk about is “A Temporary High”, the song that seems to be the most popular from this album amongst warriors (fans of Aurora). This might be because of the party-like vibe in the instrumentals. This track is less connected to religion as some songs before, and more about keeping strong love for the earth, instead of forgetting how beautiful everything on earth can be over and over again.
There are some more songs on the album, and they are very great to listen to as well, so I would recommend doing so! As many of you might know, I’m a huge fan of Aurora, and that might make this review biased on one hand, but on the other hand it’ll explain my big love for her music and the personality she puts in her music. This album might be my favorite of hers, due to the so many different vibes going on in there. I would say the whole thing is a total banger, and this review would almost have existed out of the sentence “this album is amazing”. After writing all of this I still stand by my point, and I would invite you to listen to the album, and maybe even fall in love with it.
