TOMORA – I DRINK THE LIGHT

TOMORA is the collaboration between Tom Rowlands of The Chemical Brothers and Norwegian artist AURORA. Their debut album Come Closer is out now via Capitol Records, and “I Drink the Light” is the latest track from it. The partnership has been building for years: the two first connected at Glastonbury, where Rowlands invited AURORA to record with him after seeing her perform. Those sessions produced her guest appearances on the Chemical Brothers’ 2019 album No Geography, and Rowlands later returned the favour with a contribution to AURORA’s 2024 album What Happened to the Heart?. Come Closer is where that accumulated chemistry finally gets its space.

The album runs twelve tracks, moving across house, techno, alt-pop, and further out without settling into one register. Rowlands has described the project as making “the music that we’ve been waiting to make” — the collision of hard and soft, ugly and beautiful. “I Drink the Light” sits at the more luminous end of that spectrum, the kind of track that earns its place as an album centrepiece rather than a lead single. What’s striking is how neither artist subsumes the other: the album shifts between melodic pop and avantgarde structure track by track, and the tension between those poles is the point.

TOMORA debuted live at Manchester’s New Century Hall in late March, sold out, and have since played underplay shows at the Regency Ballroom in San Francisco and the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles. They appeared at Coachella on 12 April and return for a second set on 19 April. Come Closer was the project behind one of the more interesting mysteries on the Coachella lineup poster — the name appeared with no information attached, which turned out to be an effective way to arrive. Two artists who already knew each other’s work well, finally making the record they’d been circling. It’s a strong entry point.