Whole World as Vigil

Lauren Auder only goes for big swings. As the French and British songwriter put it to The Line of Best Fit: “To my own detriment probably, I’m very invested in making big-sounding records… and that’s a lot of work.” Though she started as a SoundCloud rap producer, by her 2023 debut, the infinite spine, she had developed a beguiling form of chamber pop equally inspired by experimental music and piano-based soft rock. Its callbacks to early ’00s piano pop are nostalgic but slippery: Auder’s cryptic references to numerology and scattered blasts of noise are rarely easy to digest. Imagine an entire musical project with the energy of Kristin Hayter belting Hoobastank’s “The Reason,” and you’re in the ballpark.

Not a lot of acts are going for broke right now, especially when plenty of musicians are just plain broke. Auder’s second album, Whole World as Vigil, doubles down anyway. There are no live strings or horns, just oceans of electronic orchestration from Auder and co-producers Alex Parish and Dviance, but she uses all the tools in her arsenal to make it sound enormous—even sampling an industrial CNC machine on “Praxis.” Vigil sounds brighter than the pummeling infinite spine, which still means it’s full of unpredictable production choices and lyrics on the edge of comprehension. When opener “Marrow” explodes on the line “Let greed in” (using a tritone harmony known as “the devil’s interval,” no less), it’s a statement of pride in indulgence.

You’d be forgiven for thinking some superproducer like Greg Kurstin worked on “Yes,” a suspiciously straightforward ’90s dance track, yet beneath the polish, Auder sneaks in allusions to anarchist writers (“A picture of Christ in a T.A.Z.”) and clever double entendres: Over Madchester pastiche, “Gave a whole lot just to spend on E” could refer to ecstasy or estrogen. The motorik-powered “Praxis” is an ode to forward momentum: “Every time I walk out of the house that’s praxis/Every step I take keeps the world on its axis,” Auder sings, though her background yelps convey the exhaustion of perpetual movement.

Auder’s maximalism works because the sentimentality comes with moments of painful realism: As her narrator talks someone off the ledge on “pier,” she sings, “There’s a love you can learn to accept that once felt so trite” and qualifies that with “The world doesn’t change.” The drumline loops and VST strings would be over-the-top if the performance weren’t so impassioned, the stakes not literally life-and-death. On “Candles” love isn’t enough and Auder watches someone lose their battle with mental illness (“There were always two visions/In both you collapse, in one you fix”) until a bitcrushed snare finally provides catharsis. On the penultimate “Orchards,” she samples Ghostface Killah and quotes Rilke, joined by a choir of fellow musicians including Midwife and Devendra Banhart to chant, “There is no place that does not see you/You can change your life.” On a record so steeped in the perceptions of others, the thought is both encouraging and slightly terrifying.

The prevalence of ballads means Whole World as Vigil is a slightly more homogenous listen than infinite spine—the only real outlier is IDM-inflected closer “Say Nothing,” an Avalanches collaboration—but it’s every bit as dense. And then there’s “No Outline,” a piano ballad so sweeping and aching it’s subversive in how much it doesn’t subvert anything. Compared to other songs here, it’s almost jarring to hear Auder bellow over an instrumental this delicate. This record envisions a world where pop music could be this daring and this emotional, where nothing holds Auder back from being as weird, or as accessible, as she wants. It’s not every day an experimental SoundCloud artist’s work could fit the annual John Lewis ad. Auder’s music pulls in multiple directions at once, until the most emotionally authentic presentation wins out.