Melissa Auf der Maur: the apartment tapes, opened at last

Melissa Auf der Maur's first release in 15 years is 15 tracks of her own 1990s four-track demos and tour recordings, gathered as the soundtrack to an exhibition and now out on Envision Records and MAdM Productions. The tapes were made in an apartment and on the road, and nothing on the record was written for an audience.

Auf der Maur was born in Montreal in 1972 and first played in public with Tinker, the indie rock band she formed as a Concordia University student in 1993. Hole hired her as their bassist in the summer of 1994, and she plays on Celebrity Skin. She left in 1999, toured with The Smashing Pumpkins in 2000, then released her own debut, Auf der Maur, on Capitol in 2004, and Out of Our Minds in 2010 on her own label. The rest of the career runs through photography, a few film roles, and Basilica Hudson, the arts centre she runs in Hudson, New York with her husband, the filmmaker Tony Stone. The record comes from the apartment years underneath all of it.

The songs were recorded alone on a four-track tape recorder in her Montreal apartment, and they are joined by experimental recordings captured on tour. Auf der Maur produced with Alex Crow, Radwan Ghazi Moumneh mixed, Ryan Morey mastered. Every song is hers, published through Spitunia Music, apart from Love Is The Drug, written by Bryan Ferry and Andy Mackay of Roxy Music. The album came out on September 4, 2026, with pink cassettes in an edition of 500 and coloured Galaxy translucent vinyl limited to 300 copies, shipping on or around December 4, 2026.

A four-track in an apartment is a one-person machine. Whatever is on these tracks was played or caught by Auf der Maur before anyone else heard it, and the record keeps that privacy: no band filling the corners, no outside ear tidying the takes. What it offers is a working method, and the songs are shaped by it. They start, make their point, and stop.

The first half behaves like songs. Active Heart opens at full song length, ... And The Next Day follows, and Desire is Critical and Water Wars keep that run going. Then the tape starts cutting itself short: Courtney Chimes In, In The Reflection and Flesh Flush are fragments, and Sparkle Bass is gone in 38 seconds. That brevity is the record's method and also its limit.

Is She His? opens the second half, and Fancy Piece brings on the record's only guest, The Hunger World. Between them sits Love Is The Drug, the one song she did not write: Roxy Music's, by Bryan Ferry and Andy Mackay. It is where the archive admits there was a world outside the apartment. The tour recordings show up in a title like Billy Seoul Crowd, which plays as a document more than a song, and the record closes on Sea Of Tranquility and Skip A Beat.

This one is for anyone who wore out Celebrity Skin and wondered what the person playing those lines did with a free afternoon and a tape machine. It sits beside Out of Our Minds, the other record where she let the concept lead, and a long way from the 2004 debut with its budget and its band. If you want a follow-up in that direction, this is 15 sketches and no single.

What does not work is the middle, where the fragments outnumber the songs. In The Reflection and Flesh Flush pass before they can argue for themselves, and the record leans on the listener to fill the gaps with context. The cost is real: the tapes are private, and privacy does not always survive being published.

Three and a half. The playing is sure, the voice was already there, and the fifteen-year wait makes the room sound better than a finished record would have.

The tracklist

Hear it