Runaway offers more than sweeping vistas and soaring vocals; it delivers an intimate meditation on solitude and searching. From its first frame, there’s a sense of something vast yet deeply personal. Shot in a barren, wintry landscape, the video captures both physical and emotional desolation. It’s stark, but never cold.

There’s an undercurrent of science fiction here, not in a literal, genre-bound sense, but in mood and tone. It’s the kind of eerie otherness that hums in the background, unspoken but felt. Like much of AURORA’s work, the video exists just slightly out of time and place, suspended in a world that feels real but you know might not quite be.

This early release in her career may not have as much visual complexity as some of her later work, but that simplicity becomes a strength. Alone in the landscape, she moves through something that feels like survival, though the narrative remains purposefully ambiguous. Is she escaping, searching, or simply moving to keep from standing still? The ambiguity is the point. The repetition in the refrain, “But I kept runnin’ for a soft place to fall,” reframes the journey: she’s not running from something, but toward something.. herself, perhaps.

The cinematography plays a crucial role in this restraint. The soft focus, the pale, cloudy palette, and the slow drifting motion of the camera build a visual language that feels both vulnerable and composed. These choices resist the temptation to romanticise the surroundings, instead creating a fragile, intimate atmosphere that holds space for the viewer to project their own sense of longing.

One of the final shots - AURORA standing on a mountaintop, screaming into the void, calls to mind Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Whether it’s a cry of defiance or desperation is left unanswered, but it lingers. It’s a release, a rupture, a refusal to be silent.