The Sound Veil Society‘s debut album “Things We Kept” is built around an unusual kind of intensity. The record rarely reaches for aggression or dramatic excess; instead, emotional weight accumulates through restraint, space, repetition and the careful relationship between voice, electronics and silence. That became even clearer to me after seeing the duo at E-Only before spending more time with the album. Live, the songs seemed capable of becoming physically larger without sacrificing the intimacy they carry on record.

The Swedish-Norwegian project brings together Erlend Eilertsen and Hans-Olof Mattsson, two musicians with extensive histories in Nordic electronic music, but “Things We Kept” does not sound like an exercise in accumulated experience or genre expertise. The more interesting question is what happens when experience becomes instinct: when musicians know enough to stop demonstrating what they know and instead concentrate on what a song actually needs.

Released on 11 September 2026 through Progress Productions, “Things We Kept” is the duo’s first full-length album. Its title becomes more revealing as the record unfolds. What we keep is not necessarily what we consciously choose to preserve. Memory, grief, unfinished conversations, attachments and previous versions of ourselves remain present long after circumstances have changed. That tension between movement and emotional permanence runs quietly through an album whose apparent delicacy repeatedly turns out to carry considerable force.

The Sound Veil Society interview

Karo: I saw you at E-Only before hearing “Things We Kept”, and what struck me was that the performance generated enormous emotional pressure without relying on aggression or theatrical excess. Is restraint something you consciously build into The Sound Veil Society, or is it simply where the two of you naturally meet?

The Sound Veil Society: It’s the natural way for us to express ourselves, and TSVS is the outlet where we can give these feelings and emotions free space in our performance, both on record and live.

Karo: “Things We Kept” is a debut album made by musicians who are anything but beginners. Does starting a new project after years of experience give you greater freedom, or does experience make it harder to surprise yourselves because you already know too well what works?

The Sound Veil Society: Good question! In a way, it gives us more freedom, as we use our experience together with what we have learned over the years to create something new. But it might just be the circle of life, as we evolve through different phases in our lives, with new experiences and so on.

And it would be boring to repeat ourselves, so to trigger creativity and motivation, we just do what we like and hopefully someone else likes it as well.

Karo: The album feels remarkably coherent across music, lyrics, photography, videos and the physical booklet. Did you think of “Things We Kept” as a complete world from the beginning, or did that visual and emotional language gradually reveal itself while the music was taking shape?

The Sound Veil Society: We did have an idea from the beginning to be very visual in what we do as TSVS.

The album itself is a result of our journey in making it. After a year or so of making a lot of demos, we decided where we wanted to take our sound, and after that everything just fell into place.

“Things We Kept” became a complete world through the process and, indeed, there is a thought behind the booklet, videos and music completing each other.

Karo: There is something almost paradoxical about this record: it sounds delicate, but never weak. I kept thinking of tempered glass: transparent, apparently fragile, yet internally capable of carrying enormous force. Where does that balance between vulnerability and strength come from in your writing?

The Sound Veil Society: Really like your reflection of the record!

It reflects quite well who we are as people, in a way, as both of us are emotional beings, with our share of struggles both in the past and present. But that can also be used as a strength, because you need a certain amount of strength to deal with the challenges in life.

So for us it is a very natural process and nothing we “try” to do. It just happens that way.

Karo: The lyrics repeatedly return to movement: leaving, running, waiting, returning, searching for air. Yet emotionally, many of the characters seem unable to escape what they carry with them. Were you consciously interested in the difference between physically moving on and actually changing?

The Sound Veil Society: Not really. It is just our way of describing thoughts and feelings that are close to us, or stories and reflections that have inspired us over the years.

Karo: The title “Things We Kept” becomes more interesting the longer one spends with the record, because what people keep is often not something they would consciously choose: grief, unfinished conversations, versions of other people, even destructive attachments. What does “keeping” mean to you in the context of this album?

The Sound Veil Society: We think that everything we experience, be it good or bad, stays with us to some degree, even when we have almost forgotten about it, because it shapes us into who we are right now. Without all the experiences we go through in life, we would not be the same people we are today.

Karo: Erlend’s voice is very exposed in these songs, but the arrangements rarely try to underline every emotion he expresses. How do you decide when the music should support the voice and when it should deliberately leave it almost alone?

The Sound Veil Society: It’s all about the feeling, really, and nothing we think too much about when we make music. To express ourselves the way we want, it just tends to become like that.

Karo: One thing I noticed both at E-Only and on the album is how important space is. The songs are not afraid of air, pauses or sounds that are allowed to remain isolated. In electronic music, where it is technically very easy to keep adding layers, is knowing what to remove as important to you as knowing what to write?

The Sound Veil Society: In a way it is, but the most important thing for us is to write a good song and express the feeling we want to express with it. We do use quite a lot of layers, but they are often subtle and just there to emphasise the sound.

Since we have some years behind us making music, we have learned that sometimes less is more.

Karo: The visual material often uses roads, water, landscapes, silhouettes and people partly disappearing from view. They feel less like illustrations of individual songs than fragments of memory. How closely do you work on the relationship between image and sound, and what can an image express that you deliberately leave unresolved in the lyrics?

The Sound Veil Society: It depends on the idea of the song we are working on, but we often get visual ideas while making music. An image or a video clip itself is a great way to describe emotions, and combining sound and visuals simply makes a story more complete.

Karo: Your musical backgrounds give you access to an established electronic vocabulary, yet “Things We Kept” does not sound interested in demonstrating genre knowledge. Was there anything from your previous projects that you consciously had to unlearn in order for The Sound Veil Society to develop its own identity?

The Sound Veil Society: Not much, really. The only thing we have been trying to do is shorten parts, as it is easy to keep things simply because they sound good, but in the end they often just make a track less interesting.

Other than that, everything else just fell into place during the making of it.

Karo: At E-Only I had the impression that some of these songs actually became larger through performance without losing their intimacy. Has playing the material in front of people changed your understanding of the album, perhaps shown you emotional qualities in certain songs that were less obvious in the studio?

The Sound Veil Society: It can happen, but we often already have an idea of how a song will work live when we make it.

So most of our work is made just as much for the live stage as it is for a record, actually. Of course, before the first live show, we didn’t know how our vision would translate to the audience, but after these shows we really feel that we get a special connection with the audience.

Karo: “Things We Kept” establishes a very precise emotional and visual identity for a first album. Looking ahead, does that identity now feel like a foundation you want to deepen, or something you already feel tempted to disturb? What are you curious to discover about The Sound Veil Society next?

The Sound Veil Society: In a way, it is a foundation to build upon and is, in many ways, the core of our concept. But we do want to evolve and make something new along the way, so we don’t yet know what it will become.

But that is also part of the fun: exploring new sides of a concept. We will always aim to be as honest and raw in our expression.

About The Sound Veil Society

The Sound Veil Society is a Swedish-Norwegian electronic duo formed in 2024 by Erlend Eilertsen and Hans-Olof Mattsson. Eilertsen is associated with Essence Of Mind and Lights A.M. and joined Xenturion Prime in 2024; Mattsson co-founded Code 64, later established Xenturion Prime and has also been involved with Essence Of Mind.

The project debuted with “The River” on 24 April 2025, followed by “OK” on 22 August 2025 and “Hunger for Light” in March 2026. Their debut album, “Things We Kept”, was released by Progress Productions on 11 September 2026. The standard edition contains eleven tracks, including “Voices” featuring KÅRP; the CD adds three bonus versions, while the album was also issued on black-and-white splatter vinyl and as a limited MiniDisc edition.

The duo performed at Nocturnal Culture Night and E-Only Festival; a live video for “Nothing to Say” was recorded at E-Only in Leipzig in March 2026. The Sound Veil Society are already confirmed for Eastside Festival in Halle (Saale), Germany, on 2-3 July 2027.

Karo Kratochwil

Based in Wrocław, I work as a music journalist and photographer covering electro, industrial, EBM, gothic, and darkwave. My work includes features and live coverage, as well as concert, portrait, promo, and theater photography. What interests me most is the connection between artistic intention, what the work communicates, and what unfolds live on stage, all in pursuit of the bigger picture behind the music.

Swedish-Norwegian electronic pop duo The Sound Veil Society release their debut album “Things We Kept” on 11 September 2026 through Progress Productions. The record runs to eleven tracks and appears on CD with three bonus tracks, on a limited black and white splatter vinyl, on a MiniDisc edition capped at 50 copies worldwide, and digitally. Preorders are open.

Erlend Eilertsen and Hans-Olof Mattsson started the project in 2024 and put out three singles before the album. The pair bring an electronic pop that pairs wide synth arrangements with melodic vocal lines and mid-tempo rhythms.

Progress Productions describes the album as the delayed follow-through on that first single: “The wait has been long but ever since the band dropped their debutsingle “The River” they have been working hard […]”

Formats and tracklist for The Sound Veil Society album ‘Things We Kept’

The eleven-track running order is “Another Day”, “The River”, “Fishmonger’s Boy”, “Nothing to Say”, “Hunger for Light”, “OK”, “Bound In Circles”, “Track Record”, “Voices (feat. KÅRP)”, “The Longing” and “Epilogue”. Swedish act KÅRP guests on “Voices”. Bjørn Marius Borg of Xenturion Prime added guitar and bass to “Hunger for Light”.

The CD carries three extra tracks that rework the singles: “The River (Extended)”, “OK (Radio Edit)” and “Hunger for Light (Radio Edit)”. The MiniDisc holds one exclusive track of its own and is the format the label caps at 50 copies.

All three physical editions are on preorder through the Progress Productions shop, which lists the vinyl at 299 Swedish kronor, the MiniDisc at 279 and the CD at 139. The digital album is on Bandcamp, where the eleven-track version went up for preorder on 5 August 2026.

To open the preorder the label issued a video of “Nothing to Say” recorded at E-Only Festival in Leipzig on 13 March 2026, filmed by Alex Jung.

About The Sound Veil Society

The Sound Veil Society formed in 2024 around two musicians with long records in Nordic electronic pop. Erlend Eilertsen, from Tønsberg in Norway, runs Essence Of Mind and the cinematic project Lights A.M., and joined Xenturion Prime in 2024. Hans-Olof Mattsson, from Lysekil in Sweden, co-founded Code 64 in 2003, started Xenturion Prime roughly a decade later, and played in Essence Of Mind in its later years. The demo of “OK” was the first piece they wrote together.

Their debut single “The River” arrived on Progress Productions on 24 April 2025, paired with an extended version. It carried them to the midnight slot at Nocturnal Culture Night in Deutzen on 5 September 2025, their first German show. “OK” followed on 22 August 2025 and “Hunger for Light” on 6 March 2026, both with extended mixes and both with official videos. In March 2026 the duo played the warm-up party of the fifteenth E-Only Festival at Stadtbad Leipzig, the show the new live video comes from. Progress Productions states the pair is already confirmed for several 2027 festivals, among them Eastside in Halle (Saale).

Progress Productions, the Swedish label run by Torny Gottberg, has carried the duo from the first single onward and released all three preceding singles. Side-Line covered the label’s approach in a labels interview with Torny Gottberg. “Things We Kept” is the project’s first long-form release and its first physical release in any format.

Bernard - Side-Line Staff

Chief editor of Side-Line – which basically means I spend my days wading through a relentless flood of press releases from labels, artists, DJs, and zealous correspondents. My job? Strip out the promo nonsense, verify what’s actually real, and decide which stories make the cut and which get tossed into the digital void. Outside the news filter bubble, I’m all in for quality sushi and helping raise funds for Ukraine’s ongoing fight against the modern-day axis of evil. Besides music I’m also an SEO and AI content flow specialist and have an interest in everything finance from stocks to crypto. There is music in everything!

side-line.com

Here’s a project you should pay attention to for sure. Swedish/Norwegian synthpop duo The Sound Veil Society have just released the digital single “OK” via Progress Productions. The 2-track release, holds the title track plus an extended version.

A video was also released.

“OK” follows the duo’s debut single “The River”, issued in April 2025 on Progress Productions.

The band will be playing the NCN – Nocturnal Culture Night (Deutzen, DE) on September 5, 2025.

About The Sound Veil Society

The band formed in 2024 and consists of the Swedish/Norwegian duo of Hasse Mattsson (Code 64 / Xenturion Prime) and Erlend Eilertsen (Essence of Mind / Lights A.M). They made their live debut in Gothenburg in early 2025 and release through Swedish label Progress Productions.

Their first single “The River” appeared on April 24, 2025, followed by “OK” on August 22, 2025. The project brings – excellent – atmospheric electronic pop/synthpop.

Bernard - Side-Line Staff

Chief editor of Side-Line – which basically means I spend my days wading through a relentless flood of press releases from labels, artists, DJs, and zealous correspondents. My job? Strip out the promo nonsense, verify what’s actually real, and decide which stories make the cut and which get tossed into the digital void. Outside the news filter bubble, I’m all in for quality sushi and helping raise funds for Ukraine’s ongoing fight against the modern-day axis of evil. Besides music I’m also an SEO and AI content flow specialist and have an interest in everything finance from stocks to crypto. There is music in everything!

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