AU/RA RELEASES NEW SINGLE “OUTSIDERS”
LISTEN HERE
(October 27, 2017) – Today, Antigua based rising star Au/Ra releases her atmospheric new single “Outsiders,” listen HERE.
On “Outsiders,” Au/Ra wrestles with a feeling familiar to teenagers all over the world. “I’ve always kind of felt like an outsider,” she muses, “Not just because of growing up in the middle of nowhere, but also because I’ve always just been a bit introverted. I wanted to make a song for people who don’t feel like they fit in, and just say, ‘It’s okay to be a bit weird. Whoever you are, you shouldn’t feel less powerful just because you don’t fit in with the typical in crowd,” speaks Au/Ra.
Au/Ra is a uniquely nomadic teenager. A frequent visitor to L.A., she speaks and sings with the lilting accent of someone who lives there, and yet, in reality, English is her third language. Born in Ibiza, she initially spoke Catalan, as well as German. It’s partly this rich linguistic and cultural background that gives her the ability, at just 15, to write glistening alternative pop songs that can speak to anyone. Wildly talented, with an eye for detail, Au/Ra’s career has started phenomenally well. With over 15 million accumulative streams of her debut single “Concrete Jungle,” along with key support from media like The Line Of Best Fit, Wonderland, NME, Popjustice and more, she’s back with “Outsiders,” which is set to launch her as a ones to watch for 2018.
“Concrete Jungle,” her propulsive debut release in 2016 was a true statement. “That song was my perspective of coming to a big city for the first time,” Au/Ra remembers. “Seeing that there are so many different kinds of people living there, and that you need to figure out of who really has your best interests at heart.” More generally, it’s a critique of the consumerism and materialistic obsession of city life. Au/Ra’s story unfolds itself through the song in cinematic vignettes: her lyrics burst to life with images like ‘abandoned retail emporiums;’ and ‘Amazon Prime the new world power’. In her songs, interwoven with this, Au/Ra naturally manages to give a voice to people’s differences being ok. The anthemic “Kicks” pounds along on sparse insistent percussion as she sings ‘What’s dust to you is gold to me, we’re just different books to read’.
In most of Au/Ra’s deeply visual, evocative lyrics is a sense of escapism, influenced by her fandom of anime and fantasy. Growing up devouring Studio Ghibli films, she’s always loved to disappear into the soft-edged, uncanny world of Miyazaki animations, and uses similar designs to flesh out the visual world of her music. “I see my music in my head as anime,” she says. “The world of those movies, they’re so different, and the characters have so many random traits that make them weird in a unique way.”
With her lovingly made outsider-pop, Au/Ra is providing a similar kind of space in her song writing: one where misfits feel at home and where the listener gets to peer for a minute through the lens of an artist who has simultaneously grown up outside the system but who speaks with the zeitgeist of her generation.
Stream / Download “Outsiders” HERE
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