“What's a life worth living if you ain't gonna bleed for nothing?” Aurora sings on the Kate Bush-esque “To Be Alright.” This type of plea abounds on the singer's fourth album, a work of defiant yet overwhelming acceptance of wounds. As always, she's visceral in her descriptions. “Can you feel your blood / running in and out of your heart? / Needles sewing up gaping holes?” she asks on the antipodean optimistic indie-pop of “Your Blood,” whose preppy electric guitars and queasy, hopelessly romantic melody recall the Cardigans. And on the astute, poetic “The Conflict of the Mind,” she implores her lover to open up. “Only when I see you crying / I feel conflicted inside / My heart is filled and broken at the same time,” she repeats.
In the first half of the album, Aurora, post-breakup, says all that remains unsaid and does not close the door on her sadness. “We are good people and we both deserve peace,” she sings on “Some Type of Skin,” before yelling, “Oh my God! It’s so hard!/We need to get some skin!” But it’s not just the romance that hurts. The armor acquired is cast aside for catharsis. She then turns to spirituality, an organ treated as a cerebral being that channels poetic and connected complexity. The pop-horror anthem “The Dark Dresses Lightly” heralds this change. Her claustrophobic gaze after the breakup is turned outwards, filled with anguish, anger and resentment towards the emotionally alienated masses. “All this fear, it’s contagious,” she sings.
Moving through celestial 80s disco and synth pop, club-inspired trance and electronica, she captures a pandemic of human arrogance and evasion. On the dry “Starvation,” she asks, “Why do we have to die to see the light? / We're starved for love,” employing both romantic metaphor and critique of inequality. Then, on the twangy, guttural “My Name,” she cringes at our collective ignorance of unhealed trauma and environmental overconsumption, reminding listeners, “You'll eventually be eaten by yourself,” before concluding the section with an apocalyptic, earthly rave on the inventive, raucous “My Body Is Not Mine.” Essentially monolithic, What Happened to the Heart?'s worldview presents bloodshed, for both self and planet, as ecstatic and immeasurably healing.