Rain Steam Speed

About

Nils Lassen, Danish composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist, releases his second album Rain Steam Speed.

The album takes J.M.W. Turner's 1844 painting Rain, Steam, and Speed — The Great Western Railway as its conceptual frame: a locomotive emerging from golden haze, old and new colliding at a speed that admits no hesitation. For Lassen, the image maps onto the present — a moment in which familiar structures are giving way under forces that benefit from the confusion. Rain Steam Speed is his response: eleven love songs written for a world in transition, structured as a single day following the arc of the sun from morning to dusk. Birdsong and rain appear throughout as recorded sound; the sun functions as a recurring metaphor for something beyond the everyday. The songs are love songs in the broad sense — addressed to people, to time, to the possibility that things can still turn.

The album follows Fingerprints (2025), Lassen's solo debut, which introduced a sound built on layered vocal harmonies, cinematic orchestration, and guitar that moves between the restrained and the abrasive. The core ensemble returns: drummer Tomas Ortved, backing vocalists Anders Wallin and Marianne van Toornburg, and guitarist Kitty Drue, with Lassen handling vocals, bass, and keyboards. Recorded and mixed at Ambassador Studios in Copenhagen, mastered by Tommy Steuer at TS-Musix Studio, Leipzig.

Two singles have preceded the album. "Under Your Spell" (15 May 2026) moves through suspended, uncertain space — a love song built around disorientation and the strange gravity of surrender, held between loss and the possibility of what may still come. Hella Fuzz noted that Lassen "never forces the sentiment," letting the song evolve on its own terms; Allen Peterson Reviews observed that he "keeps pushing forward, carving his own way in the music industry." "Somersault" (12 June 2026) turns lighter in texture: steady rhythms, soft guitar, an atmosphere of open space and momentary stillness. Listeners have drawn comparisons to Talk Talk, Slowdive, and Nick Cave, though Lassen's songs tend toward the more intimate and understated end of that range.

Rain Steam Speed will be released on 4 September 2026 via Aenaos Records on all digital platforms, and vinyl.