Sondre Lerche namechecks Taylor Swift, Drake and more on new single "Avatars of Love"

"Avatars of Love" follows last month's "Cut" and "Turns Out I'm Sentimental After All" tracks, and will appear on Lerche's Avatars of Love album with last year's "Dead of the Night".

The new single sees Lerche reference music by over 25 artists, including Taylor Swift's folklore and evermore albums, Drake's "Signs" (and Snoop Dogg's track of the same name), Britney Spears, Groove Armada, Joni Mitchell, Blake Mills, and many more.

Lerche explains, "I had scribbled the title "Avatars of Love" in my notebook when I started writing the songs for this album, but the title track itself didn't materialise until the end of the whole process. On an excursion up north to the Lofoten Islands in Norway to start work on a new book I instead ended up spending the whole week writing "Avatars". I thought I was done with the album, but this song kept coming. It was meant to be a small, compact song, but when I started fooling around with some of the albums, songs, and artists that had been meaningful to my recent state of mind, its scope expanded. What started as a joke in my head about folklore vs evermore, and the anniversary of Joni Mitchell’s ultimate freedom vs love travelogue, Blue, ended as this musical rant that changed the way I saw the song. All these songs, albums and artists that had helped articulate what I was feeling, before I was able to put it into my own songs. It felt like a meditation on all the themes of the album, like the centerpiece all my songs were missing. And it was clear what the album would be called."

As well as sharing the new single, Lerche has revealed that AURORA will feature on the album's closing track.

Avatars of Love will follow Lerche's 2020 album Patience, and will also include appearances from CHAI, Mary Lattimore, Felicia Douglass (Dirty Projectors), Rodrigo Alarcon, Ana Müller and more.