photo credit: Jonathan Kvien
Today Ora the Molecule has shared brand new track “Intergalactic Dance” and its accompanying video, which premiered this morning via FLOOD. The Italo disco-inflected offering is taken from her forthcoming sophomore album, Dance Therapy, that will be released on March 21, 2025, and follows first track “Løveskatt”.
Watch the video for “Intergalactic Dance” HERE. Nora Schjelderup, the creative mind behind the Ora The Molecule moniker, comments of the track: "Intergalactic dance was written from a feeling of urgency. It’s the calling to be unapologetically you while on this planet. It’s a wake up call and a command for love, in a robotic fashion. So, do the dance, the intergalactic dance, the dance of you. The song was also inspired by the novel of Antoine de Saint-Exupèry called The Little Prince that follows a little intergalactic boy who travels from planet to planet and discovers essential truths about connection, life, love and freedom of self and what is unseen, but eternal."
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.
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.
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, but also 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.
Dance Therapy is out March 21, 2025 on limited edition hand-numbered white vinyl, black vinyl, cassette and digitally. Pre-order it HERE.
No comments:
Post a Comment