AURORA DEEP DIVE PT.5 - Analysing Structure, Texture & Instrumentation (streamed 2025/07/10)

TL;DW - AURORA uses a structure of Intro-Verse-Chorus-Verse-Chorus-Bridge-Chorus* for most of her songs; most also have pre-choruses; the second chorus is often twice as long as the first chorus; the second pre-chorus can also be shorter than the first. Each section is commonly made up of 4-bar or 8-bar sections, but the pre-choruses can be irregular.
*The final chorus is the most unreliable section; after the bridge, lots of different things can happen to finish the song, but another chorus is the most common.
AURORA's likeliest approach for texture is to begin sparse and to build towards choruses, with each successive version of a section having a thicker texture than the previous version; the bridge generally drops suddenly to a very thin texture after a thick chorus; often in the outro the texture will be its heaviest, but it will also reduce suddenly before the song ends. Sometimes, the bridge will continue the build from the 2nd chorus: if so, normally the outro chorus brings the texture down again before building for the finale. Large textural changes between sections are common, but they stay mostly static during sections. AURORA also uses big long reverbs all the time.
AURORA's instrumental palettes mostly stay consistent through each song, with extra elements being added as it continues. The most common instrumentation choices are:
Solo Voice
Harmony vocals
Piano
Electric Bass
Drums
Synths
Tinkly Bell-Like Percussion (e.g. Glockenspiel)
Electric Guitars (low in their range)
On the 2nd Album, AURORA has been using more a wider instrumental palette, including kalimba and harp among others.

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00:00 Intro
03:44 Queendom
41:37 Forgotten Love
1:10:47 Gentle Earthquakes
1:35:33 All Is Soft Inside
2:02:01 WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED?