Lathe Of Heaven - Aurora

Lathe of Heaven return with Aurora, their second full-length album and a bold expansion of their sonic and thematic scope. Unfolding like a series of vivid emotional vignettes, Aurora balances the band’s punk foundation with sweeping new wave textures and brooding post-punk atmospheres, drawing influence from mid-’80s British and Finnish underground scenes, as well as traces of ’90s and contemporary experimental pop.

Recorded with Ben Greenberg at Circular Ruin and mastered by Brad Boatright, Aurora is sonically rich and referential, nodding to The Cure’s melodic depth, Musta Paraati’s gothic synths and driving percussion, and A Flock of Seagulls’ soaring vocals and angular guitar lines. It marks a striking evolution for the band—a sound more cinematic and emotionally layered than ever before.

Lyrically, Aurora reads like a collection of sci-fi short stories, deeply inspired by the works of Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Greg Egan, and Peter Watts. Themes of anti-colonialism, displacement, identity, and post-human futures guide the listener through mythic and often unsettling landscapes. The title track imagines a desolate Earth abandoned after nuclear fallout, while “Oblivion” explores the disintegration of meaning through semantic saturation. “Exodus” revisits the Theseus’ Ship paradox through a speculative lens on consciousness transfer, and “Portrait of a Scorched Earth” stands as a stark act of protest—a rare moment of lyrical directness confronting the brutal realities of war and displacement, rooted in the ongoing tragedy of Gaza.

Set for release on August 29, 2025, Aurora is literary without pretension, political without preaching, and unafraid to be emotionally raw. Every song offers a fragment of a shattered mirror—what emerges is a prismatic, haunted beauty that invites the listener to reflect on the fractured state of our world and ourselves.

Tremble without fear into dreamless oblivion. You are invited.