Norway’s Aurora Aksnes has long been on the cusp of a breakthrough. In 2015, she added a breathy vocal to a John Lewis advert about space exploration, covering Oasis’ Half the World Away and scoring a lone Top 20 hit. Earlier this year she cropped up on three songs on the Chemical Brothers’ album No Geography, a move that would have translated into further singles chart success a decade ago. Not your typical pop star – the tellingly-titled A Different Kind of Human touches on ecological disaster (The Seed), male suicide rates (The River) and outmoded gender roles (Daydreamer) – Aurora eschews her fellow Scandinavian hitmakers’ penchant for intense lyrical navel-gazing in favour of more fantastical fare that pairs Robyn’s galloping dance-pop with the airy soundscapes of Enya.
Influences are repurposed rather than used as rote inspirations, however, with Aurora’s personality shining through even when the songs have been crafted alongside top-tier pop producers such as Mark Ralph, Guy Sigsworth and Toby Gad. Opener The River may start like County Donegal’s new-age megastar, all featherlight vocals and soft atmospherics, but it soon blossoms into a thundering electro-pop stomper about the catharsis of emotional release, with Aurora’s not inconsiderable wail multi-layered like a distant choir. The Seed leans on the drum-beating histrionics of early Florence + the Machine but marries it to a clanking industrial beat and a lyric based on the indigenous American saying, “you cannot eat money”, which forms the festival-ready chorus. Apple Tree, meanwhile, cloaks Aurora’s voice in a toybox full of effects, offering up a darker-hued take on electro-pop that sounds like the Knife had they got out a bit more.
The second part of what started out as an EP series (Infections of a Different Kind: Step I was released last year), A Different Kind of Human would have benefited from its predecessor’s brevity. Tracks such as Soulless Creatures and Mothership rely on atmosphere over content, and while the title track has a beautiful melody, the “I’m an alien, me” lyrics grate quickly. Overall though, this is a curious, wilfully inventive album that deserves wider attention.
