Lauren Auder’s Byronic take on the King Krule template washes away the ooz and replaces it with a breezy romanticism and just the right amount of snarl. It’s hackneyed to juxtapose an artist’s age with the maturity of their music, but when it comes to Lauren Auder, the disconnect is almost startling. At first glance, the 19-year-old London producer and singer-songwriter seems indubitably of the moment: his waif-like appearance, gender-fluid fashion sense and close relationships with some of the U.K.’s hottest underground rappers—including slowthai and Jeshi—feel custom-built for youth culture ubiquity. Modeling spreads in Another Man and Dazed alongside a glowing Vogue profile have established him as a rising darling in the fashion world, and his signing to True Panther Sounds,.
The sonics of Auder’s debut EP, Who Carry’s You, place him in an entirely different universe. The five tracks on the record, driven by his resonant, Scott Walker-like baritone, evoke a primal darkness utterly at odds with his visual aesthetic—long hair, painted nails, gender-bending outfits and the occasional bit of eyeshadow. In his music, Auder creates an immersive world where Christian iconography jostles with pagan mysticism, and classical strings fade into menacing trap percussion and frenetic electronic maximalism. Beautiful and harrowing by turn, the music on Who Carry’s You is a cathartic expression of raw emotion imbued with a lyricism closer to romantic poetry than pop.
The new EP ‘two caves in,’ is out March 5th:
The Fat Angel Sings 