Mattson, Jared & Ruban Nielson - FEAR

Recorded in June of 2024, ‘FEAR’ is a joint album from Jared Mattson of The Mattson 2 & Ruban Nielson of Unknown Mortal Orchestra - an  instrumental guitar record with a heavy nod to Vini Reilly’s The Durutti Column.

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. 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, 'FEAR' was finished. - Jared Mattson