It’s only natural to wonder how Yes reacted to Jon Anderson’s 2024 album with The Band Geeks. True proved that Yes’s long-serving and now long-departed former singer could still reach the spiralling highs of the mothership, and lifted the bar for modern Yes music at the same time. How would they respond? What album would they make?
Perhaps surprisingly, they embraced what the press statement accompanying the news of Aurora’s release optimistically calls “a modern workflow”. In other words, the band members recorded remotely, sending files back and forth in the ether, from home studio to home studio to home studio. And the result feels flat.