Lauren Auder at YES Basement

Whole World As Vigil is billed as a love album. But most love albums don’t feature songs about talking somebody off a ledge, collapsing under the weight of mental illness, or insisting on forward motion while sounding, if anything, exhausted by the effort. Even where the songs land somewhere more straightforwardly romantic, Auder rarely gets there in a straight line – production doubles back on itself, the lyrics stay just out of reach. Keep it complicated, stupid, seems to be the general approach.

Auder grew up shuttling between Watford and Albi, a French town built around a Gothic cathedral, and was producing tracks for Jeshi and Slowthai while still at school. By 2023’s The Infinite Spine, she’d turned that adolescent experience into baritone-led chamber pop dressed in real strings and horns, obsessed with numerology and sudden noise – music that sounded, as she’s put it herself, like someone “very invested in making big-sounding records,” cost be damned.

Vigil keeps that scale but strips the live strings out entirely – everything here is built and sampled, including an industrial cutting machine put to use on ‘praxis’. Opener ‘marrow’ detonates on a chord interval nicknamed the devil’s own, and the record never quite shakes that off. By the time the choir-led ‘orchards’ arrives, sampling Ghostface Killah and quoting Rilke, transcendence feels less like a destination than something Auder’s trying to talk herself into (and out of, and into again).

At YES Basement, expect both halves of the record to hold at once: the pop song built for a wedding playlist (albeit a slightly weird one), and the one that sounds like someone working out how the hell to even keep going. It’s a small room for a very big record. Sometimes they make the best gigs.