Day 219: Lauren Auder – Whole World As Vigil
I’ve been hearing lots of Lauren Auder on BBC Radio 6 as of recent. I hadn’t heard of her before but the song “no outline” actually stopped me in my tracks, so time for me to break my tradition of only doing daily albums that are 20+ years old. Ooo look at me, I’m very modern, I listen to such cool new stuff – I don’t, but let’s pretend. I think I have so much music history to get through that I’m consciously not really exploring newer things at the moment, but I’ll make an exception for this.
Lauren Auder is a British-French singer-songwriter and record producer who started her career producing for French and British rappers, working with artists like Slowthai and Jeshi. She then transitioned more into ambient music and neo-classical, then she pivoted into doing orchestral pop. Whole World As Vigil is her second LP, released at the end of last month.
Even though it’s only her second album, Lauren Auder has developed a sound that’s very distinct and unique to her. The writing on the album is vivid, if not occasionally a bit hard to follow, and she writes in a way where you can feel that she has something to say. The writing paired with the swooping, all-encompassing orchestral and dreamy pop sound pretty quickly wins you over.
She talked about the single “praxis” on her Substack, saying:
In my darkest and most difficult days, I would make a secret pact with myself that so long as I left the house and walked for a few hours, I could forgive myself depressive spells; I could be in control and I could feel productive. It’s a tried and tested formula, and only now writing this am I reminded of, please forgive me, Kierkegaard’s words on the matter: “Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.”
Genuinely, hell yeah. I think something similar, the worst days of my life have been saved by walking. I once walked myself back into feeling happy to be alive by forcing myself out of the house to go walk around and look at trees. A lot of this album consists of similarly relatable sentimetns about struggling but persevering in a way that we’re all probably somewhat experienced in, and the way she writes about it is what makes the album such a stand-out: it’s human, it makes you feel a bit more alive.
My favourites ones from the album are “mantra”, “no outline” and “marrow”, but there wasn’t a single song there I was keen to skip. It’s a very reasonable 8/10, but it’s clearly showing the potential for her to do something that’ll score much higher in the future.