Ruban Nielson and Jared Mattson Announce Desert-Recorded LP FEAR — Hear ‘AMERICAN EAGLE’

Ruban Nielson of Unknown Mortal Orchestra and Jared Mattson of The Mattson 2 have a new collaborative record called FEAR, due 6/5 via Jagjaguwar, and they’ve debuted the lead single ‘AMERICAN EAGLE’.

The pairing feels deliberately simple on paper: two musicians who discovered each other online in 2024 and, already mutual fans, decamped to Palm Springs to make a record quickly. According to the notes, they tracked FEAR in June of that year over just a couple of days, aiming for something that lived in liminal places rather than tidy resolutions.

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.

True to that framing, the lead single ‘AMERICAN EAGLE’ arrives with a video directed by Mark Francis. It’s presented as a document of two players testing a shared vocabulary in a short, focused burst, rather than the result of a long, studio-polished campaign.

Tracklist:

1. ‘HIGH T’
2. ‘RIVER RAFTING’
3. ‘TESTAROSSA’
4. ‘AMERICAN EAGLE’
5. ‘WEDGIE’
6. ‘TOUCHDOWN’
7. ‘RAZOR BLADE’

FEAR is out 6/5 via Jagjaguwar. Pre-order it here. Watch the Mark Francis-directed video for ‘AMERICAN EAGLE’ below.

Hessed Porras & Moe Nielson