Brian Eno surprise releases new album ‘Aurum’, exclusive to Apple Music

Brian Eno has surprise-released a new album, ‘Aurum’ – check it out below.

• READ MORE: Fred again.. and Brian Eno – ‘Secret Life’ review: ambient soundscapes from master and apprentice

Last night (March 20), Eno surprise dropped ‘Aurum’ on Apple Music, marking his latest solo release since 2022’s ‘FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE’. The album is exclusive to Apple Music due to its use of the service’s spatial-audio technology, meaning the record won’t be available on Spotify or other streaming platforms.

‘Aurum’ consists of 11 tracks and spans one hour and 19 minutes. It marks his 30th solo album – you can check it out below.

Besides releasing ‘Aurum’ exclusively on Apple Music, Brian Eno has also had a chat with Zane Lowe for Apple Music. In the 40-minute chat, the two speak about the new album, using Apple’s spatial audio technology and AI.

On the topic of AI, Eno shared: “The biggest problem for me about AI is not intrinsic to AI. It’s to do with the fact that it’s owned by the same few people, and I have less and less interest in what those people think, and more and more criticisms of what the effect of their work has been.”

“I think social media has been a catastrophe and mildly useful at the same time. It’s possible for both things to coexist, but I think in terms of what it’s done to societies, it’s been a catastrophe. What it’s done to politics has been completely toxic,” he continued. “Again, that could have been avoided, I think. If it had started out in a not-for-profit regime, it would’ve been different, because maximize engagement wouldn’t have been the headline of the whole project. Maximizing engagement is just another word for maximize profit. If that’s your intention, then you get what we got, just like in the American food industry is maximize profit, which is why you have a lot of very, very unhealthy people.”

Eno continued: “Talking about AI itself, I’ve always been happy to welcome new technologies and to see what you could do with them that nobody else thought of doing with them, and what things they could do, other than those that they were designed for, because with all music technology, it’s always very interesting that stuff is designed for one reason, and then people start to find new things they could do that are completely beyond what the designer was thinking about.”

“Distortion is a good example. Distortion is, in a way, the sound of popular music, a lot of the things that we find uniquely exciting to do with equipment kind of going wrong. That’s quite a bizarre thought, isn’t it? That you design equipment to do this. Then, you start using it to do something else, which it doesn’t do very well, and you get to like the sound of the not very wellness.”

• READ MORE: ‘Eno’ review: a solid narrative structure underpins this wilfully random documentary

Brian Eno’s last solo release was 2022’s ‘FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE’, which scored a three-star review from NME‘s Patrick Clarke: “‘FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE’ is never quite an album that is completely comforting or despairing. Instead, it explores the vast reaches between the two and uses introspection as a means of finding stability in the chaos. It offers no conclusions or solutions for humanity’s vast existential threats, but it does set a groundwork from which we might make a start in tackling them.”

Following ‘FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE’, Eno teamed up with Fred Again.. for the 2023 record ‘Secret Life’. That album scored a three-star review, with Will Richards writing for NME: “‘Secret Life’ sees him handbrake turn once again into ambient haze, assisted by the man who made it all happen for him. This surprise album – despite its frequent beauty – works best as a puzzle piece rather than a standout record in its own right.”

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