Copenhagen producer, composer and musician Trentemøller will release his self-titled album on November 13th through his own label, In My Room.
Its first single, Terrified, features Mew frontman Jonas Bjerre and reveals a clearer, more pop-focused edge to Trentemøller’s established fusion of electronics, shoegaze and guitar noise.
Across ten tracks, Trentemøller pushes contrast into the production itself, moving between abrasive guitar peaks, fuzz-heavy dream states and sharply defined melodies. For the first time in his career, every song features vocals.
The guest list includes Sakura, Anika, Jonas Bjerre, The Raveonettes’ Sune Rose Wagner, Midwife, Tan Cologne and Trentemøller live-band singer Emma Acs. Rather than treating these contributions as conventional features, Trentemøller integrates each voice as another component within the arrangement.
I knew early on exactly who I wanted singing on these songs, people I deeply respect and could already hear in my music, friends and a few I’d never worked with before. We never met in the studio; everything was exchanged remotely. That suited me perfectly. I’m pretty shy, to be honest, and it gave the vocalists the privacy to really open up.
Most of the vocals were recorded in the singers’ homes before being folded into Trentemøller’s independently constructed sound world. The remote process allowed each collaborator to work privately while giving the producer full control over how the voices interacted with the album’s synths, guitars and dynamics.
The album’s first single, Terrified, began as a more heavily washed-out shoegaze production. Trentemøller later stripped away some of that density, using voice-like synthesisers to create a cleaner and more immediate arrangement around Bjerre’s melodies.
Terrified is probably the poppiest song on the album. In its original form it sounded a lot more shoegazey, but I wanted it to be crisper and clearer, less washed out. So I went for synths that almost sound like human voices, with a magical, otherworldly quality to them. When the instrumental was done, I sent it to Jonas Bjerre with a few melody ideas, which he took further while adding new melodies of his own.
Bjerre’s stream-of-consciousness lyrics confront anticipatory fear—the mind’s habit of rehearsing disasters before they happen.
I think sometimes when you dream about things that make you fearful and uneasy, it’s your mind trying to prepare you for any scenario, like you’re processing catastrophes that have not and may not ever happen.
Bjerre also created the single’s animated video, extending its uneasy psychological atmosphere into a visual format.
Trentemøller produced the record himself, applying a stricter emotional test to every track rather than allowing technical polish or stylistic consistency to determine the final sequence.
The noisy got noisier, the dreamy got dreamier, the melodic got even more melodic. I was ruthless this time. Okay, kill your darlings! If a track didn’t give me a feeling of freedom, wanderlust, sorrow, love or that pure ‘I don’t give a fuck’ feeling… It was gone.
That approach gives the album its extremes: clearer pop structures coexist with distorted guitars, expansive shoegaze textures and intimate home-recorded performances. It also reflects Trentemøller’s resistance to producing music around platform logic.
I’ve just never been much good at being told what to do. I don’t really follow trends or think in algorithms, that whole calculated side of the music industry is really not a pretty sight.
Trentemøller will take the album across Europe next year, including a London performance at Electric Ballroom on March 11th. The tour will mark the first time he has performed one of his albums live in its entirety.
Now I can’t wait to play these songs live with my band. For the first time ever, I’m gonna play the whole album, start to end. Every single song!
By treating vocals as production material rather than decorative features, Trentemøller expands the artist’s sound without abandoning its darker foundations. The technology stays in service of contrast: human voices meet synthetic ones, home recordings enter maximalist arrangements, and shoegaze density is reshaped into something more direct.
Trentemøller live dates:
27 February – Berlin, DE – Huxleys Neue Welt
1 March – Munich, DE – Kesselhaus
2 March – Bern, CH – Bierhübeli
3 March – Paris, FR – La Cigale
5 March – Brussels, BE – Ancienne Belgique
6 March – Brussels, BE – Ancienne Belgique
7 March – Luxembourg, LU – den Atelier
9 March – Amsterdam, NL – Paradiso
11 March – London, UK – Electric Ballroom
13 March – Cologne, DE – Carlswerk Victoria
17 March – Oslo, NO – Rockefeller Music Hall
18 March – Gothenburg, SE – Pustervik
19 March – Stockholm, SE – Fållan
20 March – Copenhagen, DK – Store VEGA