Lauren Auder is building a monument to the present moment

On her 2023 debut the infinite spine, the British-French singer-songwriter and producer touched on issues she had with her body, her identity and where she wanted to be in the world. “The record was very much about surmounting that,” she tells me, “and I think I first started writing in a place where I hadn’t.” By the time it was out in the world, she realised that it had led to her having grieved, processed and accepted a lot of the themes she had written about. “That felt really serendipitous and strange and good,” she summarises.

I gently challenge her view that serendipity is a factor, when to me it feels clear that Auder took brave steps to learn and grieve through the catharsis of her music – whether or not she realised it during the early stage. Her music as a catalyst for personal growth could be deemed a wishing well of manifestation, but her aspirations weren’t tossed toward a mystical fate or muttered into a mirror. They’re a crystallisation of Auder sharing with us her learnings: You can’t go under it, you can’t go over it… You’ve got to go through it. “Writing about all these things is like expelling them, but then you need to remind yourself of the things you know, all the time,” she says.

“There are rarely moments in my life where I haven't known what the answer is. But being in the present and actually internalising what you know is a hard mission. I don’t think it's some kind of magical process in a manifestation way, but it's a whole different thing to embody the thoughts.”

This deep aspiration has evolved over to her new record Whole World As Vigil – released this March – with intentionality. “It's all written about a period of my life, and I was writing about what I wanted to take out of that moment,” she says. “Only now that they're coming out I feel like a lot of the things that I was thinking about, and the lessons I wanted to learn, and what I wanted to say to people are only now reaching me. It's one of the real big joys I’ve had working on music – realising when that happens. It’s always in ways that I couldn't quite predict.”

Having grown up between London and a small town near Toulouse, with musical literacy gained from her heavy metal journalist parents (“Nothing past 1985. The days where heavy metal was barely heavy: no metal.”), Auder is signed to one of London’s most exciting independent labels untitled (recs), home to deathcrash, Jerskin Fendrix, TAAHLIAH and Famous.

At every juncture, her sophomore bears the intensity of the energy she poured into it. “To my own detriment probably, I'm very invested in making big-sounding records,” she says, “very detailed and lush in some way, and that's a lot of work.” the infinite spine took Auder four or five years to write, along with her trusted collaborators dviance and Alex Parish. During its arrangement, she was simultaneously starting the process of developing the follow-up album’s first tracks, which were later fleshed out during a month in Paris – itself a replication of the Covid lockdown cocoon that bore her debut.

The new album holds a magnetism that matches the drama of her wholly absorbing stage presence. “The first record was a bit more introspective and inwards-facing, and this one felt like I wanted it to be in the world,” she explains. “We wanted to be live, present and exciting, and moving and kind of upbeat. So I'm really excited to do that much more.”

“Let greed in” is the refrain repeated on the captivating album opener “marrow”. It’s a call to arms to embrace the limitless possibilities of life: to experience fearlessly and feel deeply. It’s easy to forget that that’s the whole point of it all. But greed isn’t something that Auder aligns with selfishness. Inversely, it’s an act of showing strength to her community. “There's a responsibility to everyone around you to actually achieve joy and be happy and present in the moment, because that's what allows you to then be good for others,” she says. “When I'm self-punishing, I'm at my most narcissistic.” Her reflections are observed through living in a moment where a lot of therapised language is justifying a lack of selflessness. “Like, ‘You're allowed to disconnect and not talk to your friends and not be there, and say, ‘I don't have the bandwidth for this right now,’ and I think that is a really slippery slope,” she explains. “But what I think is important to realise is you can't be anything to anyone if you have not achieved some sense of purpose and joy. The idea of filling yourself up with experience and achieving a sense of self. It felt important to talk about on this record.”

Despite being an artist who describes herself as “totally ego-driven,” Auder’s new album is decidedly not about disbanding ego, it’s quite the opposite. “It’s about creating a sense of ego that is strong enough to withhold communication and community and relationships. Because that's a good thing,” she says, warning that “you can lose yourself in some kind of emotional ideal, and I think a lot of the record was about that.”

Community is a value which has persisted throughout Auder’s musical life. Her collaborations have spanned from 2020’s cover of "Some Small Hope" with Caroline Polachek, produced by Danny L Harle, to her new album featuring a Jessica Winter co-write and co-production from The Avalanches on the closer, “say nothing”. The swelling track “orchards” features an illustrious choral section featuring dozens of Auder’s peers. Devendra Banhart is in there, experimental vocalist Midwife, Jack from Famous (R.I.P.). “Theo, the singer from synth punk band Powerplant, and Murkage Dave,” says Auder. “The list is really long. I just posted it on my close friends’ story to all the musicians I know being like, you want to get in this choir? And a bunch of people did. I feel like my musical community has got this vast because I care about all these different kinds of avenues.”

Auder’s intentionality doesn’t stop at the reasons behind assembling her choral section of friends. “I wanted all these people to come and sing on this because we have people to bear witness,” she explains. “What you're doing when you're making a piece of work is you're trying to create some kind of witness to your life. That's all about connection and community. And I want the present to be constantly evolving, constantly remembered.”

The repeated refrain of “You can change your life” is Auder’s mantra to live by, inspired by the 1908 poem Archaic Torso of Apollo by Rainer Maria Rilke. “It’s looking at this old Greek statue of a dismantled bust of Apollo and it's thinking about beauty, art and life,” she says. And of the lines: “There is no place that does not see you / You must change your life,” she felt the sentiment deeply. “Looking at something so beautiful in the eyes and how history remembers, and that feels so important,” she says. Vitally, the poem’s lines are juxtaposed beautifully in the track by a Ghostface Killah sample from “Mighty Healthy”. “It’s where he says, ‘Shake that body / Party that body,’ and I was like, ‘These are the same quote! This is the same sentiment!’ It's like, you gotta do something here,” she says. “I loved the idea of this parallel where it’s this rap sample and I'm putting everything on the same level - it's all there.”

Auder has been purposeful in stopping to analyse whether she’s where she wants to be in life, and think about what she could do to get there: a privilege that generations past haven't had the option of. “I think it's a privilege, but it's also a total curse. It's very hard right now to create a coherent narrative for yourself because you have this infinite option,” she says. “That's an important thing that I've been thinking about a lot. Often it's presented as, ‘Oh, you have all these options.’ Comparison is rarely something that actually makes you feel better. It feels like a bit of a misnomer and a misunderstanding of human nature to be like, ‘but it's better than it's ever been for X amount of people,’ because actually, the options are anxiety-inducing.”

Whole World As Vigil, in many ways, takes the form of a place where all of Auder’s learnings and lived experiences have the possibility to crystallise in her own life. “People cave in on themselves under the weight of all these different heavy expectations,” she says. “It's like all the different narratives that you've had throughout all of history are culminating in this one point in time where you have to be the most gentle, you have to be the kindest – but you also have to be the go-getter, you have to be the best at your job. At some point, you have to be able to take all that you know you are, and all that you need, and focus that.”

Auder’s pre-teenage discovery of emo informed the pure, raw emotion of her output. “It's fucking cool that people were able to kind of open their chest up and let their hearts pour out,” she says. “I feel indebted to that kind of ethos. I can make something big about my small feelings.” She drew inspiration from the proto-Soundcloud rap that she dug out online as a teen too, which turned out to be a big early cataclysm. “To me, it was the most exciting thing in the world. It made me make music,” she says. “Even now, it's still where the most exciting and innovative stuff is. 16-year-olds are making it. Even though where my music's at right now is in a kind of a different lineage, the DNA is still in the record,” she says of the booming 808s that underpin the album.

The kindness to herself and her lack of regrets is refreshing. “All my life, I’ve made the best choice I could make in that moment,” she says. “It might be something that you look back on with hindsight and be like, what the fuck was I doing, but the only thing I could ever regret is not doing things with intentionality.” Even though there have, of course, been moments where she hasn’t lived that, she accepts that there was a part of her that made the decisions for a reason. “It may be reasons that you don't relate to now, and it may have led you down bad paths, but it was you who did that, and I think it's important to shut these doors, go forward and say OK well now I can make choices that will be better for me, but I made the best choices I could make at the time.”

Auder went to Catholic school and grew up in a country with a deeply Christian heritage, and her reflections on faith and morality inform her output’s symbolism. “I love the idea of forgiveness. It's not about God, it's about humans, and it's about the ability to change and take on board others,” she says. “When it talks about Jesus on ‘orchards’, it's about meeting someone who's kind of trapped in the very idea that ‘Jesus is gonna be the way to forgive,’ and then the end of the song is actually aboutyou can change your life. That's my favorite part - that sentiment I want to carry.” This humanistic value system is a simple but life-affirming message of empathy to take from Whole World As Vigil. As Auder puts it, “It can't be about anything but us, right here. I want to love everyone like my kin for nothing more than the right now.”