The Gods We Can Touch

Released January 21 2022

For her third full-length album, Norwegian singer-songwriter and electro-pop producer Aurora Aksnes retreated to a castle in Rosendaël, France, a gorgeous, secluded place. “It's very small and it's surrounded by these huge mountains. It's like the castle is being protected by a Mother Earthly hug,” she tells Apple Music. “It’s very magical and feels like a sanctuary. It has history.” Unsurprisingly, mythological interest reverberates across the album, from allusions to Greek goddesses as earthly beings in large, ethereal, Kate Bush-esque moments (Aphrodite on “Exist for Love,” Panacea on “Cure for Me”) to an interest in Frenchness (“a thank you to the castle that let me record my album,” she says of her collaboration with Lyon musician Pomme on “Everything Matters”).

“I was very inspired by people and our relationship with power, with each other, with religion, with faith throughout history,” she says. “A long time ago we seemed to feel like God was around us—in the ground, in the trees, in the water we drank—and therefore also in us. At some point in history, we removed God from the earth and put him far, far away up in the sky.” The idea of spirituality surrounding us—that gods can be touched—exists throughout. “The album is about freedom.”