photo credit: Jonathan Kvien
Today Ora the Molecule returns with the announcement of her sophomore album, Dance Therapy, set for release on March 21, 2025 via Mute. Alongside this exciting news, she has shared the first track from her record, the shimmering and danceable “Løveskatt.”
Nora Schjelderup, the creative mind behind the Ora The Molecule moniker, says of the track: “Løveskatt is about being in love and wanting to build a home and create a nest with your loved one. You know, just a basic human need.”
“I feel like this is my debut,” she says of the album that is, in fact, her sophomore outing as Ora The Molecule. “It’s more me.”
It makes sense Schjelderup is drawing a line in the sand. When Ora’s actual debut Human Safari arrived in 2021, there was some murkiness about whether it was a solo project or a fully-functioning trio. In comparison, there’s no question that Dance Therapy is Schjelderup as a lone mastermind, conceiving a new world all her own. On this album, she wrote, recorded, and produced everything, save a handful of co-production contributions from Mathias Risdal.
The driving force behind Dance Therapy stems from Schjelderup’s experience as a DJ, a career that has steadily ascended since the pandemic. She imagined herself being behind the decks, while simultaneously seeing herself in the audience, and asking: “What would I play for that Nora in the crowd to make her day just a little bit better?” Fueled by classic late ‘70s club sounds and Italo-disco, this became the retro-futuristic fever dream of Dance Therapy. All the sounds that bring Schjelderup joy as a DJ and fan, without concern for what others might like or dislike, reframed in Ora The Molecule.
While Ora The Molecule’s music derives inspiration from the magic of communal club spaces, Schjelderup has to indulge her introversion to capture it. As in the past, she decamped to her studio, located in a cabin in the woods outside of Oslo. There, she processed a series of severe losses, the therapy of the album’s title becoming literal.
But couched in what Schjelderup calls the “drag” of Ora The Molecule, this healing process manifested less as confessional songwriting and more as catharsis via fantasy. Dance Therapy became deeply conceptual, with Schjelderup working off a prompt: If we encountered intelligent life in outer space, how would she present herself? “Would I be this mundane shit — I’m constantly heartbroken, I don’t know what I want to do when I grow up,” she says. “Or will I try to rise and be the highest version of myself possible? To be as glamorous and fabulous as I could?”
Schjelderup’s intergalactic vision drew upon a broad array of references. While exploring a “study” of electronic pioneer Mort Garson’s Mother Earth’s Plantasia, she began favoring digital reproductions of various modular synths and theremin. Italo disco star Raffaella Carrà inspired Ora The Molecule becoming a more full-blown character separated from but symbiotic with Schjelderup herself, while the music of Annie Lennox helped shape Dance Therapy’s narrative heft.
The resulting body of work is rife with ebullient, infectious dance music juxtaposed with remarkably complex meditations on grief, mortality and heartbreak - all transmuted through the lens of Ora’s cosmic inner journey to discover her own sense of self, human or otherwise.
And, at the end, Schjelderup has finally created a new transcendence: both Nora and Ora but neither, a deeper sense of herself and the disco superhero she has willed into being, a new identity from everything that came before.
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