BOILER ROOM NZ
End your week with five minutes of perfection
Aldous Harding does it again
CHRIS SCHULZ
May 8
Stop what you’re doing, if you can, and devote five minutes and 35 seconds of your life to this. It is, Apple Music tells me, the longest song she has released since 2019. It’s a worthy investment, a song you want to understand, to play on repeat, so you can peel back the layers and climb inside. It is a simple song, just loping piano and bass, a quiet drum loop then a haunting lick of flute. Her lyrics are slow and thoughtful, spilling out of her gently, then coming back and reforming in different ways. Her voice simmers, then it soars. I get chills when I hear it. I get chills every time I hear it, and I have listened to this song a lot this week, because it is five minutes and 35 seconds of perfection.
‘Train on the Island’ is the third track on the new album of the same name from Aldous Harding. That album was released today and it is surreal, personal, funny, warm and intense, an unstable world waiting for you to explore, if you dare. As it is with every Aldous Harding album, the experience is like sinking into a bubble bath then getting frequent jolts from a stun gun. You need to be in the right headspace, the correct frame of mind, ready for what she might throw at you. I adore the process of unpacking a new Aldous Harding album because one thing is for sure: she’s going to test you, and then she’s going to reward you.
Rave reviews have already seeped out, warning us of what this is, as critics wrestle with something that is almost impossible to fully understand. “It hums with that same curious, simmering ambiguity, like something half-remembered and still rearranging itself,” reports Stereogum. “Her lyrics are mysteries to be unpicked for deeper meaning, like dreams awaiting analysis,” writes The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis in a four-star review. Mojo puts it like this: “There’s a temptation to sit down with a new Aldous Harding album like you’re a detective trying to crack a case: evidence folders piled up, post-it notes on the whiteboard, a forensic psychologist on speed-dial.”
‘Train on the Island’ is the perfect example of Aldous Harding’s mystique in action. The title is a grand metaphor for travelling listlessly, going nowhere, doing the same old shit, making the same dumb mistakes. I have listened intently, analysed her lyrics obsessively, and it feels like she’s trying to convey a sense of pointlessly circling the same old drain. That realisation made me smug, like I’d finally cracked Aldous Harding’s unique code. But then I realised nothing she does is that direct, that surface level, that on the nose. “I feel the sea, dishonest art in me,” she sings on ‘Venus In The Zinnia’. The more I listened to ‘Train on the Island,’ the more confused I got. And the more confused I got, the more I fell in love with that song.
This is, of course, Aldous Harding’s entire reason for being. I have seen her pull this magic trick live countless times (including the donut incident), and it leaves me baffled and bewildered but cackling with delight every single time. You try your best to reach her, to get to where she is, and by the time you get there she’s already gone. Her train has departed that station, destination unknown. Maybe Aldous Harding really doesn’t want any of us to know what any of her songs truly mean. “People are just so keen to get to the bottom of stuff that’s none of their business,” she said in this cracking 2019 interview. It’s a quote that makes me chuckle every time I read it because it’s so her.
Aldous Harding puts it another way on Train on the Island stand out ‘Riding That Symbol’ when she sings, “No one knows what I’m into”. Five albums in and ain’t that the truth. Guess there’s nothing else to do but shut up and hit play on ‘Train on the Island’ again…
