Photo credit: Jonathan Kvien
Today Ora the Molecule has shared the playful, star-spanning video for “Becoming A Human,” taken from her anticipated new album Dance Therapy that is out now via Mute. She has also announced May US tour dates that will include Los Angeles, Seattle and New York.
Watch the video for “Becoming A Human”, directed by Úlfur Kjalar Eyjólfsson, HERE.
Purchase or stream Dance Therapy HERE.
Speaking on the video, she says: “Ulfur was the bartender at this place I used to DJ and one day he told me he wanted to make a music video. I said “sure!” And suddenly he had gathered this huge crew of friends and professionals to create this epic queer action sci fi video. I was blown away. A dream come true.”
LIVE DATES:
5/13/2025 - Seattle, WA - Madame Lou’s
5/15/2025 - Los Angeles, CA - El Cid
5/22/2025 - Brooklyn, NY - Night Moves
Tickets are on sale now.
Nora Schjelderup, the creative mind behind the Ora The Molecule moniker, comments of the track: "It was written from a dark place, and a light place, it gives some sort of solution for when you tend to nihilistic thinking. The song is about letting go of fear and the self awareness that dictates and controls our experience on this planet. I hope you find the song as you need it."
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 now on limited edition hand-numbered white vinyl, black vinyl, cassette and digitally. Purchase it HERE.
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