Nora Schjelderup is one of Norway’s leading DJs, and is also the creative force behind Ora the Molecule, who have just released Dance Therapy, which might be the most accessible avant-garde disco pop concept album you’ll hear this year. Ora the Molecule has existed since around 2015, releasing a series of singles that were compiled on Human Safari in 2021. Human Safari is filled with modern Euro-synthwave, with just enough throwback sounds to conjure up the feel of a lost Thompson Twins album for fans of 1980s technopop.
While Human Safari is technically Ora the Molecule’s debut record, Schjelderup has noted that Dance Therapy is the first album that fully represents her as an artist. Aside from some production and songwriting collaboration with Mathias Risdal and engineering by Chris Allen, Dance Therapy is primarily the work of one person, Nora Schjelderup.
Schjelderup has cited Annie Lennox as an influence on Dance Therapy, noting that Lennox “has a storyteller voice”. While Schjelderup may be referring to Lennox’s work as a solo artist, Dance Therapy is most reminiscent of Eurythmics’ Savage, a polarizing album for many hardcore fans of the Lennox and Dave Stewart duo. A return to the electronic minimalism of earlier Eurythmics albums, Savage features a set of songs that appear to be told from the same narrator’s point of view.
That’s also true of Dance Therapy, which tells a story that reflects Schjelderup’s journey as she retreated to a remote cabin to record the record while navigating a period of grief. Dance Therapy would appear to be an appropriately literal title for its creator, and maybe for some of its listeners as well.
Telling a story through dance music also recalls David Byrne and Fatboy Slim‘s Here Lies Love, which extensively used dance music to tell the story of former Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos. The introductory track, “Becoming a Human”, sets the scene: “Ora” is a molecule that wants to become human and asks a powerful entity known as the Oracle to fulfill this wish. Oracle warns Ora about the perils of being human, but Ora is insistent and is granted the wish.
The next several songs detail Ora’s early freewheeling days as a human. In the suitably spacey “Intergalactic Dance”, Ora explores disco decadence and is encouraged to both “freak out” and “let it all out”. “Løveskatt”, a sleek disco banger, paints a picture of domestic bliss. Meanwhile, back at the disco, now-human Ora meets up with the “Prince of the Rhythm”, a track that Schjelderup has described as “‘Dancing Queen’ for boys”.
While all these tracks are heavily synthesized, they also conjure up the sound and feel of classic late 1970s disco. The first half of Dance Therapy culminates with “Is This Love?”, in which Ora hopefully contemplates the human feelings they have encountered so far on their journey.
The story changes direction abruptly with “Nobody Cares”, a darkly humorous track in which Ora notes in a deadpan voice that “they only love you when you’re dead”, assuring anyone within earshot that no matter what they’re going through, nobody really cares. That dour lyrical message is underlined by the breezy but disaffected music and the “la-la-las” that Schjelderup sprinkles throughout the song.
From “Nobody Cares” onward, Dance Therapy takes on a darker lyrical tone, even as the songs remain tailor-made for the dance floor. The Ora character appears to encounter a loss deeper than romantic heartbreak and essentially enters an existential crisis, described in the haunting “If I Believed”. The character flirts with immortality in “Evig Ung,” a hypnotic song that mentions “your biomedical gerontologist gave you an avoidance list”, apparently of things that can mess with one’s eternal life.
As the album nears its conclusion, Ora/Schjelderup admits that “some kind of sadness has taken over me now” and embraces dance as therapy. On the gentle closer, “Becoming Ora”, Schjelderup briefly tells the story of going to her cabin to work through her grief and create art.
With the music quivering and threatening to break up behind her, Ora the Molecule concludes Dance Therapy by noting that she’s “waiting for that day / Maybe tomorrow / Everything will be resolved / That it will all be / Somehow better.” Wordless vocals drift away into space, much like two very different examples: Gustav Holst’s “Neptune the Mystic” and Thomas Dolby‘s “Cloudburst on Shingle Street”, to close the record, leaving listeners to contemplate their own human journeys.
If you love synth-drenched disco Europop concept albums, you may have just found your album of the year.