Aurora

Live Nation and Secret Sounds are thrilled to announce that powerful Norwegian alternative pop songstress AURORA is returning to New Zealand, bringing her powerful live performance to the Auckland’s Powerstation in March 2023. The highly anticipated dates will see the enchanting artist grace the stage with a host of new songs from her critically acclaimed 2022 album, The Gods We Can Touch.

Since bursting onto the scene in 2015 with her debut EP, Running With The Wolves, AURORA has amassed over 20 million monthly listeners on Spotify, an incredible 2.6 billion overall streams and 1 million+ global album sales. This all started near Bergen, Norway where Aurora Aksnes grew up surrounded by forests and mountains, she was just six years old when she first felt the compulsion to sit alone and create. By the time she was twelve she had written ‘Runaway’, a song that would later receive a full release and would inspire a twelve year old Billie Eilish to make her own music. The song catapulted into the Top 40 Singles Chart in the UK for the first time in 2021, six years after its release and fourteen years after it was first penned, it also peaked in the Spotify Global Top 20 thanks to an unexpected TikTok trend that saw the track reach a whole new global audience, clocking up 300 million views a day.

A triple threat, AURORA is renowned for her talents as a singer, songwriter and producer. From performing her contribution to Frozen 2’s pivotal track ‘Into The Unknown’ at the 2020 Oscars, playing Coachella and Lollapalooza to appearing all across US talk shows and featuring on millions of TikToks, AURORA has a diverse legion of fans that admire her multifaceted artistry including peers Troye Sivan, Doja Cat, Katy Perry, Shawn Mendes and the aforementioned Billie Eilish.

Having grown up surrounded by nature, AURORA’s first three albums focused on issues like global capitalism, the environmental crisis and what it means to be human amid it all. She has worked with the UN’s CHOOSE programme to lessen her environmental footprint, converting the amount of harmful gases she uses as a touring artist into electricity in Thailand. Through her stark, angular pop AURORA has debated with herself and urged fans to stand up for themselves and each other, while giving us mantras to chant like “you cannot eat money”. Her most recent record The Gods We Can Touch turns that piercing gaze inward, sharing her inner self for the first time.

Released in January 2022, The Gods We Can Touch saw AURORA score her first UK Top 10, landing at #8 on the Official UK Album Chart. Inspired by Greek mythology, the euphoric record was the third most streamed new album in the world on Spotify the weekend of its release. The Gods We Can Touch finds AURORA reunited with long term producer Magnus Skylstad, and a carefully-curated cast of collaborators: guitarist Fredrik Svabø, Askjell Solstrand on piano, French singer songwriter Pomme and renowned bandoneon player Per Arne Glorvigen. It sounds like an album that was made in a castle, and that’s because it was. AURORA chose to record much of the record in Barony Rosendal, a structure surrounded by mountains, resulting in a body of work that is elegant but provocative as it explores the concepts of shame, desire and morality.

Single from the record, ‘The Woman I Am’ garnered great success on the airwaves in the UK. It was included as BBC’s Radio 1’s coveted Hottest Record, Tune Of The Week and AURORA’s Piano Sessions, where she covered Harry Styles’ ‘Golden’ and performed her own track ‘A Temporary High’, became the most viewed of the past year in just one week. The song also picked up countless plays on BBC Radio 1 and BBC Radio 2. AURORA followed this with sensual track ‘The Devil Is Human’, previously only available on the vinyl version of The Gods We Can Touch. Her most recent single, the dreamy and heartfelt ‘A Potion For Love’ was released in July 2022.