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The two members of Tomora are contemplating their forthcoming debut live shows, a slate that includes an attention-grabbing slot at this month’s Coachella festival. “We’re still kind of working it out, and I’m getting a bit, ‘Oh my God, what’s going on?’” worries Tom Rowlands, best known as one half of Grammy-winning banger merchants the Chemical Brothers, and now one half of Tomora. Rowlands’ mindset, however, contrasts heavily with that of Aurora, his new musical partner.

“I don’t have any stress in my being,” the Norwegian singer-songwriter and pop experimentalist says cheerily, sitting on the floor of the duo’s north London label office with her shoes off. “I’m always like: it’s fine,” she shrugs. “Yes, the house is on fire, but we’ll work it out.”

On Tomora’s debut album, Come Closer, these different approaches manifest themselves throughout its 12 tracks; Rowlands’ kinetic yet precisely structured dance framework fusing with Aurora’s more chaotic pop nous to create a head-spinning mix of techno, trip-hop and, on the prowling title track, a skewed take on prog. In person, each fills the gaps left by the other; Rowlands, 55, isn’t keen on interviews, having purposefully eschewed them in his day job, while the impish Aurora has the ability to deliver philosophical soundbites with genuine passion. A question about Tomora’s “organic” collaboration, for example, leads to the 29-year-old declaring: “It’s like how every plant in the world just knows which direction to grow up from the earth. They know how to become what they’re going to become without anyone telling them – it’s predestined knowledge. That’s how I feel with us in the studio. It just happens like it has already happened.”

That instinctive spirit is laser-guided through the album’s elasticated lead single, Ring the Alarm, which feels like the aural equivalent of mainlining a gallon of caffeine. For Aurora, it also carries a deeper message thanks to the climate into which it’s arriving. “It’s a good time to say: ‘Ring the alarm! Be aware! Look around! Wake up!’” she says. “‘Be awake, be human.’”

She also sees the Coachella slot, which was announced before the public even knew who or what Tomora was, causing a minor ripple on various music-focused Reddit threads, as bigger than just a rave in the California desert. “There is so much emotional distress on the land there just now, like a lot of places,” Aurora says. “So it’s going to be interesting to have a little moment of escapism. I think music really matters when the world is very chaotic. So I’m more excited than I would normally be [to play Coachella] because it feels like it’s going to be a beautiful moment.”

Aurora’s ability to communicate music’s healing powers is what caught the attention of Rowlands in the first place. Watching Glastonbury 2016 coverage on his sofa (“It was the one year I didn’t go,” he says), he was transfixed by Aurora’s “combination of strength and this fragility, plus her incredible voice”. Rowlands sent Aurora an email asking if she’d be up for appearing on the Chemical Brothers’ then in-the-works No Geography album. “And I didn’t hear back for weeks,” he laughs.

Aurora, it turned out, was taking it all in. “I was very excited, and I wanted to be very myself when I answered,” she says. “And sometimes when you’re overpowered by dopamine or serotonin in the brain, you speak and act in a way that isn’t truly representative to who you are. It’s a bit too dog-like. So I waited until the serotonin and dopamine was at a normal level again.” She’d go on to appear on three of No Geography’s tracks, with Rowlands later returning the favour, adding production to Aurora’s 2024 UK Top 10 album What Happened to the Heart?.

Despite spending her childhood “singing or talking” as opposed to listening to the radio or exploring the ins and outs of the music canon – her phone only contains a handful of Enya songs, “Ethiopian music from the 70s” plus Hate It Or Love It by the Game ft 50 Cent – one of her favourite albums of all time happened to be the Chemical Brothers’ soundtrack to the 2011 action thriller Hanna. “I loved every single song and I listened to it so much,” she says. “It became a really big part of my life as a person who doesn’t really listen to music much.” Rowlands recently played Aurora Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys for the first time during a car journey: “I was like: fuck me, I’d like to hear Good Vibrations again for the first time in my life,” he smiles.

Any trepidation about working with one of her musical idols soon dissipated, and in fact Rowlands’ email arrived at the exact right time. Having been an artist since she was 16, by 2016 Aurora was burnt out from “over 300 shows in a year plus maybe 100 promo performances”. She says she was contemplating ending “the artist thing because it [was] taking away the fun from the music”. Their collaboration on No Geography was “something that felt very much like mine in a time where everything that was mine belonged to the world”, she adds.

If the Chemical Brothers collaboration was a form of rescue remedy for Aurora a decade ago, then she has since been able to return the favour. Having made 10 albums alongside fellow Chemical Brother Ed Simons, all with tours in between, by 2024 Rowlands “needed to have some other thing to think about” before embarking on another Chems album. Deciding he needed “a shot of Aurora”, the pair started recording at Rowlands’ home studio, as well as at Aurora’s family home in Norway. It was there that they road-tested some of the songs to an initially sceptical audience.

“My parents’ ears aren’t used to looking past the jarring noises of techno or rock or whatever genre it is,” says Aurora. “They only hear that it’s hard and messy. But with our music, it’s a very good door for them into a new world because I can tell that they feel it in here” – she presses the centre of her rib cage – “in a very fun way.” Her parents were so enamoured of Rowlands that he left with a gift: a Norwegian cheese slicer made from reindeer bone.

Rowlands says he was astonished by Aurora’s musicality, and her ability to finesse the jarring noises into something beautiful. “A lot of the instruments I use don’t have a concept of a note,” he laughs. “But Aurora listens and then she’ll play something and I’ll go: ‘Oh my God, that was inside the sound and I couldn’t find it.’” One story helped bond them even more, Rowlands recognising in Aurora’s distaste of a specific snare sound on her debut album a shared music-related geekery. “It ruined the whole album for me,” Aurora says. “Well, because it just didn’t sound as you wanted it to sound,” Rowlands replies.

In the decade since that debut, Aurora has taken even more control in the studio, but is also aware that some people will simplify Tomora down to a male producer creating songs for a female singer; that her work in the studio may be sidelined. It’s an assumption that frustrated her at the start of her career: “Because then it was like: ‘Oh, this makes me feel small, this misinterpretation of my capabilities.’ But as I grow older, I just don’t care.”

She acknowledges, however, that “for other women that also produce, it is a good thing to advocate for and talk about. Because it is really fun to produce, and it’s important to be heard.” Working with Rowlands, she says, helped because his openness made it “so easy to feel respected immediately, which you don’t always expect with a more established artist that is male, and a less established [one] that is female. I’m used to demanding it, though, because I’m quite: ‘Fuck you, I’ll do it.’”

Rowlands is aware that the pair’s mutual respect means there’s little in the way of juicy confrontation. “Wait until we finish touring,” Rowlands laughs. “Fucking hell!” Aurora, ever the storyteller, lights up at the idea of this imagined bust-up. “We’ll get separate cars. We won’t look each other in the eye,” she says, practically levitating as the fantasy plays out in her mind. “But weirdly, we will also be wearing one communal hat.” Rowlands, aware of his role in Tomora, smiles and nods along.

Come Closer is out on 17 April.