Lauren Auder on her new album and playing Hidden Door

“Not to be too polemic, but I find it quite amusing that a lot of experimental music these days is actually extremely predictable.”

Predictable is perhaps the last adjective you’d use to describe Lauren Auder, a pop maverick signed to the same label as deathcrash, Jerskin Fendrix, and Famous, who routinely blurs genre lines in the process of conjuring up a sonic world all her own. Her first album, 2023’s The Infinite Spine, was an electronic pop odyssey that distilled the musical wanderings of the EPs that preceded it into something stately, atmospheric, but ultimately catchy, with as many killer hooks and massive choruses as it had eccentricities. Now, with Whole World As Vigil, she’s produced something else entirely; this is what she considers her rock record, one that was born out of collaboration, a rejection of introspection, and keeping an open mind from start to finish.

“I do think ‘experimental’ is a fair tag for this album,” she says over Zoom, a couple of weeks after the record’s release. “I mean, I threw a lot of ideas at the wall to see what stuck. That can literally just look like me messing around with one little thing for hours on end; I spent so long on the outro to pier, just trying to make something feel fat and distorted and sort of… sunburnt. Even the less obvious songs in that respect felt experimental to me; no outline is about a breakup, so it’s as classic as songwriting gets, but I was still approaching it from a viewpoint of, 'What can I do with this format? Can I fit myself within it?'”

Whole World As Vigil is a wildly ambitious ride, but such is the thought and care that goes into Auder’s crafting of the songs, it never feels likely to veer off the rails. The album works as a cohesive statement, even when it’s doing things as diffuse as employing a dozens-strong backing choir made up of her contemporaries, referencing Rainer Maria Rilke and sampling Ghostface Killah – all in the same song. “As an artist, it’s important for me to put across the things that I love and care about,” she explains; the blend of Rilke and Ghostface was inspired by her feeling that the lines by the former that she quotes and the latter that she samples ultimately express the same sentiment. 

“I’ve been thinking about this a lot, because of the rise of AI in music. People need to realise that it’s going to be able to make music that sounds like it could’ve been made by a human, but what you can’t replace are the really singular things about a specific musician that obviously reflects their lived experience and taste. That’s why I want to bring as many unique reference points to my own music as possible. I love that idea; like a branching family tree of the things I love, represented in my music.” 

Ironically, a major part of making Whole World As Vigil in her own image involved a conscious move away from the introspection that The Infinite Spine was scored through with. Aware of how easily self-examination can lead to unhelpful wallowing, Auder instead sought to make a more outward-facing album this time around. “I knew that I wanted to go that way immediately. I looked at The Infinite Spine and thought, OK, I’ve formed this persona within my own music, so surely the interesting thing to do is figure out how that now interacts with the outside world. It felt like the right move, because I was in a place where I felt more a part of the world than I’d ever been; much less in my own head than I ever had been before; marrow was the first song I wrote, and I think you can tell I was looking to give more of myself to the big wide world.”

The album is also, as Auder contends, a rock record at its core; the motivation for that diversion was in part to make the songs easily translatable to the live arena, with a slot at Edinburgh’s Hidden Door Festival in the diary for June and further headline dates to come in the autumn. “I’ll be playing the album in full, from front to back,” she says. “I put the tracks in that order for a reason. I want these gigs to feel like rock shows; I love performing, and I feel like I didn’t get to do enough of it on the last record, because it was a difficult one to make work live. This time, I wanted to get out there and play and have people sing along; I’m very much hoping that wish comes true.”

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Whole World As Vigil is out now via untitled (recs); Lauren Auder plays Hidden Door Festival, Edinburgh, 7 Jun; Hidden Door runs from 3 Jun