Australian songwriter/producer/engineer aphir has announced her latest offering ‘Avarena’. The full-length album will be released worldwide on Friday 9 October through renowned indie label and touring company Bird’s Robe, the home to and collaborator with artists such as We Lost The Sea, Chelsea Wolfe, Chat Pile, sleepmakeswaves, Emma Ruth Rundle & Delta Sleep.
Amongst aphir’s six previous studio offerings, she has traversed diverse terrain, from dreamlike choral works on 2023’s ‘The Halo Is Shapeless’ (Art As Catharsis) to the poetic desolate pop of 2019’s ‘Pomegranate Tree’ (independent).
Her catalogue has drawn comparisons to Bjork, Julianna Barwick, Karen Vogt and Anna von Hausswolff. Live, she has shared stages with icons across myriad genres – from the gothic doom folk of Chelsea Wolfe to the synth-laden legends Tangerine Dream.
‘Avarena’ is a missive that is both fearless in its production and audacious in its ambition.
Bird’s Robe Director Mike Solo said:
I’m in awe of what aphir has achieved with this record. Her production skills and songwriting have flirted with such a wider variety of sounds over the years and I have been a fan of every incarnation. But this record had me holding my breath from start to finish. It’s as good as you’ll get to a perfect record, a perfect representation of an artist, their songs and their vision translated to the listener and drawing you into their world. I can’t speak highly enough, it’s a must-listen and I’m honoured to be involved.
Stu Buchanan of the Sydney Opera House writes:
Avarena appears before us as an album of two halves; although we’re never sure which half to align with. The suite of songs, each its own puzzle piece, tempts us with a yin-yang dilemma – might Avarena yield the refuge we’re after, or lure us with its siren-call to the infernal underworld? Through its cracked mirror, it timestamps both the threat and promise that are the twin tenors of our times.
The album’s opening salvo launches with An Angel’s Tear Burn Through The Roof, a dispatch transmitted from the one side of ether to the other; spectral vocals calling across the void, stymied by a blast of static; leaving Photokeratitis to follow in its chemtrails, an ethereal voice maneuvering across igneous rhythms, guided by a north star that beams with pop prowess.
Just as we think we’ve uncovered a path forward, Avarena sidesteps us with a bait-and-switch counterstrike. The reveal is deep inside – Messengers picks up the album’s opening refrain and reasserts it with industrial fervor, a pickaxe through the album’s core. In the fragments we find tracks such as Hand on Your Heart and Dear as Salt in which Avarena mushrooms into a multi-headed hydra, purposefully confounding our journey through its perilous corridors. Ripped from the earth and designed to hold us firmly in its thrall.
Fittingly, the boss battle is a perfect conundrum. In the album’s closing moments, Avarena is vulnerable, exposed and holding us rapt in the moment. But one question lingers after its last refrain – will it ever let us go?
Speaking about the creation of ‘Avarena’, aphir said:
Avarena is the name of my 7th album and it’s also the name of a city in the sky that I made up for a story when I was a teenager. in the fictional universe of Avarena, scientists had worked out how to stabilise half a proton and the resulting material was something that looked like clouds and floated in the air bit could also somehow support human bodyweight not to mention metropolitan infrastructure. i decided to repurpose the title here for a body of work dedicated to a different idea that was also beautiful in theory
there’s a track on this album called chapel perilous, which is kind of an esoteric term for taking the L: it means realising you’ve become religiously certain of something but the certainty turns out to be based on your own delusions or ego. this album came from a place of facing that i’d indulged in that kind of certainty in an important relationship, and processing the cost of that
i wanted Avarena to be an honest catalogue of how i felt but i also wanted to tell the story with grace for my own limitations as well other people’s. it took me a lot longer to make than albums usually do, because grace moves slowly.
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