Jared Mattson and Ruban Nielson announce new collaborative instrumental album, FEAR

FEAR was born out of Mattson and Nielson first meeting in June 2024 after crossing paths online and long admiring each other's music. Nielson recorded their first improvisational session, and within two days, they had captured the seven tracks that make up the album. "AMERICAN EAGLE" arrives as the first preview.

Speaking about the experience of recording the single, Mattson shares: "I woke up around noon, disoriented, half-dreaming. Music was playing — unfamiliar, fully formed, the kind of sound you assume belongs to someone else’s life. For a moment I thought I was still asleep, hearing music I wished I’d made. Then it hit me: Ruban Nielson was already awake, in the studio, listening to what we’d made.

"We both knew it. There was something inevitable about the music — like it hadn’t been created so much as uncovered. We listened on repeat, laughing, shaking our heads. One track brought up a shared image: an evergreen forest by a lake at sunset. Ruban suddenly looked up, eyes wide, like he’d just been handed a message. 'I’ve got the title,' he said. American Eagle. The name landed the same way the music had — clean, obvious, impossible to argue with. The American Dream: hot dogs, Cokes, sunset drives. We both lost it, tears in our eyes from laughing hard for minutes straight."

FEAR was recorded and mixed in Palm Springs, with mastering by Matt Colton at Metropolis Studios in London. Discussing the making of the whole album, Mattson continues: "We swam in his pool. The conversation never stopped. The flow stayed constant, nourishing, effortless. Then Ruban said it again — the line that had already become a principle: 'Let’s make more that sound exactly like this.' So we did. Two days later, the record was finished.

"We imagined the music living in in-between places — old motels with buzzing vacancy signs, abandoned gas stations at dusk, vast parking lots lit by sodium lamps where engines idle and lives briefly overlap. Spaces built for movement, not comfort. Bleak, anonymous, quietly human. Music that could sit inside that loneliness without trying to fix it — beauty carrying a low hum of danger underneath, calm without anesthesia."

FEAR artwork

FEAR tracklist

“HIGH T”
“RIVER RAFTING”
“TESTAROSSA”
“AMERICAN EAGLE”
“WEDGIE”
“TOUCHDOWN”
“RAZOR BLADE”