Aurora Nishevci Steps Out Front on Rora And The Untamed’s Debut Album

Aurora Nishevci has spent the last few years at the edge of a stage, playing keytar in The Last Dinner Party. Her new project, Rora And The Untamed, puts her at the centre of it.

The debut album ‘Do You Like Me Now?’ is out in full, made with the British-born Mauritian composer Nathen Durasamy. The two are not new to each other. Durasamy worked alongside Nishevci on orchestrating The Last Dinner Party’s second album ‘From The Pyre’, and that record’s dense, arranged instincts are a useful reference point here. ‘Do You Like Me Now?’ works differently, treating arrangement as character rather than decoration and giving Nishevci room to find out what her voice does when it is not sharing a mix.

Debut single ‘Savage White Swan’ set the terms. The album keeps shifting register and posture instead of settling into one, which suits its subject.

Both artists describe the record as a question about their own position. “Ultimately this record is about our relationship to being artists,” they say. “There’s this inner conflict of simultaneously wanting to be seen and not seen, wanting to be in the shadows and wanting to have the spotlight.”

That ambivalence is the album’s method as much as its theme: a performer who spent years being watched without quite being looked at, now testing what changes when the attention is hers to direct.