Nils Lassen’s Rain Steam Speed is an album in constant motion, but never in a hurry. Across eleven songs, the Danish composer follows the course of a single day, using shifting light, birdsong, rain and beautifully layered arrangements to explore love against the uncertainty of a changing world.
The title takes its cue from J.M.W. Turner’s Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great Western Railway, and he makes inspired use of that image. Like Turner’s locomotive emerging through a blur of weather and colour, these songs repeatedly place something intimate against human relationships set beside upheaval, memory beside change, stillness beside movement.
It’s a tension that gives the record much of its beauty. His dream-pop foundations are expanded with touches of new wave, art-pop and post-punk, while Kitty Drue’s guitars move between softness and abrasion. Tomas Ortved’s drumming brings definition without disturbing the album’s spacious character, and the backing voices of Anders Wallin and Marianne van Toornburg deepen the sense that these songs exist inside a carefully constructed world.
‘Under Your Spell’ captures Lassen at his most suspended, allowing uncertainty and romantic surrender to drift together, while ‘Somersault’ offers a lighter counterpoint, its gentler textures creating the impression of temporarily stepping outside time. Elsewhere, ‘We’re In The Wind’, ‘Invisible Ink’ and ‘Evening Song for Emily’ reinforce the album’s preoccupation with things that are fleeting, difficult to hold or already slipping into memory.
There are echoes of shoegaze and new wave aesthetics in the way he allows atmosphere to become part of the songwriting, but Rain Steam Speed is too personal to feel beholden to familiar terrain. His cinematic background is evident through its pacing, by seeing the record gradually change colour as the imaginary day progresses.
Following 2025’s Fingerprints, this feels like a more fully realised expression of Nils Lassen’s solo work. Elegant, melancholy and quietly adventurous, Rain Steam Speed turns a world in transition into something worth slowing down to absorb.