Aurora: ‘We’re more scared of activists than of the world dying or a war’

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Ahead of her intimate show to raise money for War Child, the Norwegian singer tells Hannah Ewens how social media has ruined our capacity for empathy, and how she deals with her neurodivergence

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Aurora Aksnes is not naive about her mission to be a musician and an activist. Ten years ago, this was a variant on the cool multi-hyphenate job description in everyone’s Instagram bio. Now, not so much. The current cultural moment is something she describes as a kind of collective dip: a time when public political expression feels unfashionable, even suspect.

“People are more scared of activists than they are of the world dying,” she says, with what sounds like genuine bewilderment. “More scared of activists than of war. Isn’t that interesting?” She pauses and wrinkles her nose, but it’s not a rhetorical question – Aurora is nothing if not curious.

This intersection of activism and music, she says, is made more complicated by who is speaking – look at how people responded to Bob Vylan’s calls for an end to the Israeli military. Most people are generally accepting when a preternaturally youthful white woman talks about Palestine, but not a Black man.

“It’s really sad how scared people are to be in touch with someone who is speaking up against the large forces of the world. It makes us so weak,” says Aurora. “But with Bob Vylan, I was so surprised by how the industry reacted and how the people reacted. Two very different things.” After the duo’s Glastonbury performance, when frontman Bobby Vylan chanted “Death to the IDF” (the Israel Defense Forces), they were dropped by their agent, and their US tour was cancelled after their visas were revoked. Large pockets of the general public were supportive of them, as well as artists like Amyl & the Sniffers, Fontaines D.C. and Massive Attack.

Sitting in the Independent office podcast studio, the 29-year-old Norwegian is pale, bright, and a little otherworldly, like a snow angel. There’s a trace of Björk’s eccentricity in her, that same charge of unpredictability, with the elemental pop sensibility you get from Florence Welch. The offbeat inventiveness of early-career Grimes is there, too, not just in Aurora’s livewire observations but also in her music.

Her vocals on songs, including her most popular, the haunting folk ballad “Runaway”, seem to rise from the mist. In the past couple of years, she has caught the attention of Gen Z for her viral small-screen meditations on life, death and the strangeness of society. But increasingly, music and moral agency are inseparable for her.

To stay silent, as someone who is actually listened to – ie a musician with a public platform – is unthinkable. “To avoid using your voice simply because it’s uncomfortable? It’s just so sad to me, because you’re avoiding a very important part of you and what makes you human.”

Aurora is in London to help promote her intimate charity show at the beautiful Union Chapel on 10 December to raise money for War Child, an organisation that helps children whose lives have been torn apart by war and genocide, ahead of a cold winter. She’s split the show into two parts: Dusk, which will explore activism, humanity and the power of people, and Dawn, which will lift audiences into emotions of hope and renewal. “I admire so much these organisations like War Child, who fight that instinct to go back into your bubble and relax,” she says.

In her mind, numbness is the enemy. “There is so much information that we forget to think about what we’re seeing,” she says softly. Social media – “designed to make people more stupid, more numb” – is the prime culprit, of course. “When you see footage of a real war happening right now, real people burning and dying, in between makeup tutorials – ‘This is how you make a pecan pie’, ‘This is how I do the blah blah’ – and when it’s put like that? The really sad, inhumane things that you can’t even understand what you’re seeing, mixed with completely brain-dead things... Imagine how it makes our brain connect this war, or these inhumane things, with numbness.”

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On stage, Aurora has hinted to fans that she has a neurodivergent brain, but hasn’t spoken before about how this impacts her life as a musician. “With age and with time, I’ve become a bit better at managing being neurodivergent, and trying to not completely overwhelm myself until a point of no return. It’s not spoken about so much: neurodivergence and artistry – how they’re so meant for each other, but also so not,” she explains. “The opposite of what you want and need from this world is everything that comes along as a ripple effect from just you making your music.”

For instance, what autism and ADHD communities call “executive function” – the mental skills that help with planning, organising, and managing tasks – can be difficult for her. “It can be really hard when it’s not things that are burning in my chest, where I can go into hyperfocused mode and forget that I have a body,” she says. “When I perform, it’s very easy to forget that I’m tired or sick; it’s just gone, which is very cool. But with things that are more through the head and not the heart, it can be really difficult from day to day.”

She gets overstimulated by people very quickly, which isn’t ideal, given that being an artist means she’s constantly surrounded by them. “I don’t like the connection that happens in my head [where] individuals sometimes become like a large entity, or a wall.” She does, though, love meeting other people, because her neurodivergence means she’s especially open to strangers. “It’s like a superpower, but if it’s too much all the time, this superpower disappears. It makes me sad, because [then] I’m missing out on a lot of good meetings with people.”

Artists spend a lot of time existing in liminal spaces, an observation the pop star Charli xcx made in a recent Substack newsletter. They’re always on the way somewhere: in airport lounges, tour buses, cold warehouses ahead of photoshoots. “I’m quite good at letting all the wishy-washiness of this life trigger good things in me,” says Aurora brightly. “Like, if I travel a lot, I use that time to read a book or draw. I make it cosy. When I feel time is just wasting away, waiting to arrive somewhere or whatever, I escape into my brain and I really like it there. And I find it very easy.”

Unsurprisingly, Aurora’s solution to our activism fatigue is a return to the physical world – to the stubbornly analogue act of gathering. “When people meet in the same room for a cause, it’s so pure,” she explains. “You can see the crowd. You can feel the number. You can understand it.” Statistics become real only when embodied. “One in five children in our world are affected by war or conflict that impacts their will to grow up, to make something of their talents, their thirst to be a human and explore and play,” she says.

As a figure, that certainly sounds horrific, but cross out the face of every fifth child in your school yearbook and it’ll touch your heart. “It’s a good rehearsal to do, to pull statistics that are hard to feel,” she tells me, putting a hand to her chest, “into something that can ground the numbers into reality.” And it can go the other way, too, to help people understand positive change. War Child has helped 180,000 children in Palestine. “That’s the size of my whole city,” says Aurora. “That’s a lot of lives.”

For her global concerns, Aurora remains intensely local. She still lives in Bergen, Norway, a city with mountains for walls and winters that can stretch to eight months. As a child, she didn’t listen to much music – she’s still not sure she likes it – but at home she heard artists like Leonard Cohen, Enya and Nina Simone. Cohen taught her that feminine softness can be a form of political force. Simone taught her that good artists reflect the times they live in. Enya is just Enya (she’s evidently had a huge influence on Aurora). “If you do it right,” Aurora says, “your voice lasts for ever. And it’s a shame if that voice only spoke about useless crap.” She smiles, amused at herself. “But we need useless crap, too. I love that as well.”

Aurora is flying home tonight. It’s snowing in Bergen; she can’t wait. She’ll be moving in her new broken piano, a cheap purchase she’s excited about because it sounds “seasick”. In her home studio, she will continue to nurture an ongoing desire to create something completely shocking, and new: “It’s very clear that, as humans, we always react to either what the generation before us did or what we used to do. That’s what I’m doing, also: just following a predestined pattern of my own, where I’m currently reacting to myself before.”

Between now and when she returns to London in December for the War Child show, fans will see the start of this different phase in her career. “I’m excited to see what it becomes,” she says. Then a tiny smile. “Life can still feel unexpected.”

The only way to watch Aurora’s winter show is by entering the prize draw, in which fans can win a pair of VIP tickets. The more times they enter, the better their chances of winning.

The prize draw for the tickets closes at 11.59pm on Sunday 30 November, but you can still use the draw page to donate to War Child.

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