Making Aurora Borealis

Maya Ostrowski writes about the eighteen-month process of recording Aurora Borealis, our fourth full-length, released April 18 2025.

I. The brief

I started writing what would become Aurora Borealis on the bus between Cleveland and Toronto in November 2023. The Long Walk had been out for a year. We’d been touring for nine months. I was reading too much — histories of glaciers, an old book about fishing villages on Iceland’s western coast, a pamphlet on the politics of light pollution. The album took its name from a line in that pamphlet.

The brief I gave myself: write twelve pieces that work as a continuous sequence and as twelve discrete songs, with the same instrumental palette across the whole album. No guest spots; no singles-first arrangements. Make it a record record.

II. Reykjavík

We booked Greenhouse for January and February 2024. Reykjavík in January is mostly dark; the light comes for about four hours a day. Birgir Jón Birgisson, who engineered, is an extraordinary person to work with — he plays the room itself as an instrument. We tracked the live band: Dev on drums, me on guitar + vocals, Beatrix on cello, Carlos on bass. Mara came in on electronics for half the sessions. We did everything to tape; no fixes in software.

The Reykjavík sessions produced complete versions of all twelve tracks. They were warmer + more harmonically dense than what we’d ended up with on previous records.

III. The realisation

We sat with the Reykjavík mix for two months. The conclusion we both arrived at separately: it was a beautiful record but it wasn’t the record we’d set out to make. The instrumental palette was too narrow. The album wanted electronics, choir, more space.

Booked Funkhaus in Berlin for August.

IV. Berlin

Funkhaus is a different kind of room — massive, more reverberant, designed for radio orchestra. We tracked everything again, this time with a heavier electronic core and the Reykjavík Chamber Choir flown in for two days. Mara built modular patches for tracks 5, 6, 9, and 11. Beatrix did her cello passes alone, late at night.

Berlin produced a colder, more spacious, more architectural record. Clearer than Reykjavík; less warm.

V. The stitch

By September we had two complete versions of the album. The choice we made — and this is where Casey Tate, our mixing engineer, became essential — was to use both versions as the source material for the released record. Some tracks are mostly Reykjavík (1, 3, 4, 7, 12). Some are mostly Berlin (2, 5, 6, 9, 11). Most are a stitch — verses from one, choruses from the other, electronic textures sitting under a live performance from the opposite city.

This wasn’t the plan. The plan was to record the album once, well, in one place. The plan didn’t survive contact with how the songs wanted to sit.

VI. What we’re proudest of

The choir on track 6, “Aurora II”. We had four hours with the Reykjavík Chamber Choir; they were brilliant; we caught the take we wanted on the third pass. The mix you hear is straight from that take, no edits, no overdubs. That’s the kind of work we’d previously only hoped to make.

VII. What we’d do differently

Started in Berlin. The instinct that the album needed electronics + space was right; we should have followed it earlier. Reykjavík produced a beautiful record but not this record.

Also: the vinyl mastering. We had Heba Kadry master it for vinyl specifically — a different mix than digital, more dynamic range, less compressed. Worth every cent. Should’ve done it on every previous record.

Aurora Borealis is out now. Stream + buy at /connect. The tour starts in June — /tour.