Ten years without an album. Amelie Lens finally took the leap

Amelie Lens has released AURA — her first studio album. Eleven tracks, her own label EXHALE, out on the fourth of September.

The artist published the full text about the record on her own page on Bandcamp.

The strange part is the number itself. The Belgian has been putting out music since 2016, has stacked up seventeen EPs and some fifteen singles and become one of the most in-demand artists in techno — and in all that time never made a long-player. There are three long releases in her discography, but they are DJ mixes for fabric, Mixmag and Global Underground.

What she wrote this album about

The name is not new: AURA is also her audiovisual show, launched last year. But the record has turned out more personal than you would expect from a techno release of this scale.

“AURA is my story. Aura is about the connection between the crowd and me. Music has always been my escape, a way of turning emotions and energy into something new. When I was younger I would disappear into nightclubs and build my own world in my head. The clubs gave me a feeling of belonging somewhere — I felt a connection and a freedom I had never known before,” Amelie Lens wrote.

Further on in the same statement she lists what that road was made of: tiny local clubs and night drives at the wheel to her own gigs, then the big festival stages, motherhood, building EXHALE — and the attempt to keep all of it in balance.

There is exactly one guest on the record. The third track, run, she made with Belgian pop star Angèle — the two were first heard together in the summer, when Angèle walked on stage unannounced during Amelie Lens’ set at the Dour festival. The other ten tracks are written and produced by Lens alone.

What went on around the release

A day after the record came out she played a three-hour open-air set in her native Antwerp — on the square in front of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, which had never hosted anything of the kind. Fourteen thousand people came.

The album coincided with one more date: EXHALE, which started as a party series and grew into a label, marked its tenth anniversary this year. AURA came out under catalogue number EXH022 — digital and double vinyl.

Earlier we wrote about how many Ukrainians made the programme of Amsterdam’s ADE — Amelie Lens is on that list too.