Alt-pop star Au/Ra’s debut album ‘Heartcore’ is a reclamation of all the nerdy, fantasy worlds she escaped into as a kid. The record’s overarching narrative plays out like a retro dungeon crawler, with tracks ‘This Is Character Building’, ‘Last Heart <3’ and ‘Lo/Re’ using video game cliches of designing your own protagonist and running out of HP to help tell the twisting story of betrayal, growth and eventual liberation.
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It’s an ambitious, high-concept record that’s similar to Bring Me The Horizon’s ongoing ‘Post Human’ saga, and is the perfect mash-up of video game playfulness and art-pop emotion. No wonder she was one of the most-talked about artists at this year’s Great Escape Festival, where she took to the stage with a giant fake sword as a mic stand.
Her swaggering electro-pop music was inspired by Imogen Heap’s ethereal, digital soundscapes and Grimes’ pulsating rave-rock album ‘Art Angels’, but soundtracks for action role-playing game Genshin Impact, multiplayer battle arena title League Of Legends and its beloved animated Netflix spin-off Arcane also shaped the eclectic, energetic album. What better way to reveal the tracklist and introduce fans to the world of ‘Heartcore’ than with her own top-down dungeon adventure game. Want to dive deeper into the lore? There’s a ‘Heartcore’ comic book. “It’s a nerd dream come true,” Au/Ra (real name Jamie Lou Stenzel) tells NME via Zoom.
“It’s not surprising that it turned out this way. As I was making this record, I started going to therapy to work through childhood traumas,” explains Stenzel, who grew up between Ibiza and Antigua. “As part of that, I went back to the things that I used to love and used as coping mechanisms – video games, creative writing and The Lord Of The Rings. Making this album was my way of forgiving my childhood self for feeling out of place, and rewiring the part of my brain that made me feel guilty for being different.”
Stenzel’s first console was a pink Nintendo DS, which she used to play cutesy pet simulator Nintendogs, hectic food-based minigame collection Cooking Mama and the Barbie In The 12 Dancing Princesses adaptation while her parents (a producer father and a songwriter mother) were working together in the studio. From there, she fell in love with Final Fantasy 15 and The Lord Of The Rings. “I was obsessed with the elves. They were so cool and beautiful, with these mysterious, magical powers.” It wasn’t long before she was sharing her own fanfic stories about a character known as Aura on popular fiction platform Wattpad.
“Those fantasy worlds are where it felt like I belonged,” says Stenzel, who used them as a way to cope with dissociative feelings. “I had a lot of existential, absurdist thoughts from a young age. Creating my own worlds, or diving into fandoms, always helped me ground myself.”
Au/Ra. CREDIT: Press
She poured those outsider worries into her music. Shimmering electro-pop song ‘Concrete Jungle’ was released when she was just 14, alongside the angsty Pink Floyd-inspired ‘Outsiders’. A few months later, she released the haunting emo track ‘Panic Room’, on which she sings vulnerably about living with anxiety. Its slow-burn success got turbocharged with a CamelPhat remix and received another boost when players of anime role-playing game Gacha Life kept using the song to soundtrack DIY music videos.
“I don’t think I ever actually wanted to be a pop star, I just wanted to create cool little worlds. I only started to realise that it was a thing when people in my team started talking about me in that way,” Stenzel explains. She released her ‘Soundtrack To An Existential Crisis’ mixtape in 2021 but a dispute with her label Sony stopped her from releasing anything else for the next few years. She managed to leave her contract, but did have to abandon “a lot” of music in the process because of rights issues. “There was this mourning of art,” that followed. Let down and uncertain about what the future looked like as a newly unsigned artist, Au/Ra stepped away from music and focused her efforts on creative writing instead. “It was a safe space for me to go to that didn’t hurt.”
However, she also didn’t want to abandon her fans, so kept talking to them via her Discord server and started playing games including Minecraft, Genshin Impact, Valorant and Overwatch with them on Twitch. That escapism and community “reinstilled a lot of hope” in her. “My anxiety was really bad around that time. When you’re in a bad situation and you can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel anymore, it’s really hard to convince yourself that there is one,” says Stenzel. “I did think it wasn’t possible for me [to try and have a career in music again], but the people around me convinced me to keep going.”
The first song she wrote was ‘Blah’, a furious purge that helped her work through the anger that came with feeling betrayed and abandoned. “Once I’d done that, I wasn’t blinded by it anymore,” she says, “Then, I was able to actually dig into what I wanted to create, that would help me through the mental journey I was going on.” She wrote the devastating ‘Last Heart <3’ next, which imagines Au/Ra lost and low on hit points. It sparked the entire dungeon video crawler concept for ‘Heartcore’.
“The whole album is a big metaphor for the dungeon of the mind,” she says, with each track a level the character of Au/Ra needs to overcome to try and reclaim joy and wonder. “Obviously it was very, very inspired by my real life, but I’ve always enjoyed telling stories. It felt like I needed to escape into my own world to process what I was going through – and creatively express that in a way that would make sense to other people.” The more of herself she poured into the glitching alt-pop album, the more excited she felt about making music. “It’s a very hopecore record.”
‘Heartcore’ is out now via Polydor Records
The post How ‘Lord Of The Rings’, ‘Minecraft’ and dungeon crawler games inspired Au/Ra’s “hopecore” alt-pop debut appeared first on NME.
