Horse Vision

Seven years in the same room

Horse Vision is two people: Johan Nilsson and Gabriel von Essen, friends since school in Stockholm, who shared a studio in the uptown part of the city for roughly seven years before either of them thought to make a record with the other. Nilsson had come up through film composition and sound design; von Essen through playing in a succession of Stockholm bands. They arrived at the same music from opposite directions and only worked out how closely they overlapped once they started.

The songs that became the project were written while Nilsson was living in Copenhagen. When he played them to von Essen, it was von Essen who supplied the name — lifted from a t-shirt he had worn as a child advertising HorseVision, a Swedish gathering for horse enthusiasts. Asked about it after a show in Philadelphia, the pair confirmed that this is the entire derivation. There is no pun buried in it.

The two describe the result as a guitar band that became interested in electronic music rather than an electronic act that picked up guitars. Acoustic playing and plain chord shapes come first; sampling, processing and tuned vocals are arranged around them rather than over the top of them.

Another Life, assembled across three cities

The debut album, 'Another Life', was released on 7 March 2025 through the label inadvertent.index. It runs thirteen tracks and about thirty-four minutes, with nothing on it longer than 3:13 — the record moves in short pieces and rarely repeats a structure. It was written and produced between London, Copenhagen and Stockholm, which accounts for some of the seams that remain audible in it.

The credits are wider than the two-man billing suggests. Emil Emborg contributed production; Karl Hovmark and Guido Roos played drums; Ester Thunander added violins; Tiffi Malmgren sang and co-wrote on 'Chemicals' and the closing title track. Jacob Günther Andersen mastered it. A limited 12-inch vinyl pressing sits alongside the digital release on the band's own store page.

The track titles set the tone as much as the arrangements do — 'Toxoplasma', 'Donkey Horse', 'Segundi Garinasso', 'Overexposure', 'Snow Angel'. The joke and the tenderness are held in the same hand, which is the thing most listeners seem to fix on first.

What has followed the record

Nilsson has described the working method plainly: when a song is finished the pair want it out as soon as possible, because they did not know where they were heading before they got there. That philosophy shows in the release pattern. Three tracks that are not on the album now sit at the top of the band's own catalogue page — 'You Could Have It', 'Watching Over Me' and 'Back Of My Hand' — and a second album is in progress.

Not everything scheduled has happened. A booking at Pop-Kultur in Berlin in August 2026 did not go ahead; the festival's event page carries the band's own line about scheduling conflicts and redirects ticket-holders to another act on the bill. The cancellation is a small thing, but it is a fair picture of a two-person operation running a long international touring calendar for the first time.

The set as it stands

The clearest record of the current show comes from the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis on 14 April 2026, on the run billed as the USA + Canada Tour 2026. Fifteen songs, drawn mostly from 'Another Life' — '11', 'Animal', 'My Man', 'Toxoplasma', 'Donkey Horse', 'Chemicals' — plus the newer 'Back of My Hand' and two unreleased songs, one of them logged as 'Clip Show'. Two covers closed the gap between the duo's reference points: The Cure's 'Close to Me' and Bladee's 'One In A Million'. The night ran from 7.40pm to 9.20pm, and sat between Milwaukee on 13 April and Chicago on 16 April.

Ten days later, at RUBA in Northern Liberties, Philadelphia, on 24 April, a reviewer found the set pared back to its acoustic bones. The guitar playing was solid enough, but the two guitars were pushed louder than the vocals, which worked well when they could be heard at all. The room, by that account, was visibly waiting to dance and responded most strongly to the tracks where the synthesiser textures came through. The same piece reported that the pair were contending with broken luggage and the American motorway system on the way there.

The live archive is still thin — twenty-five setlists documented in total, seventeen of them from 2026, fifteen from the spring headline run. This is a band whose recorded output has travelled further than its stage hours.

On the road with Chanel Beads

Autumn 2026 finds Horse Vision opening rather than headlining. Current listings show fourteen dates, almost all of them in support of Chanel Beads, with Mechatok sharing several of the same bills: Denver's Marquis Theater on 21 September, Fortune Sound Club in Vancouver on 25 September, Mississippi Studios in Portland on 26 September, the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco on 29 September, Soda Bar in San Diego on 1 October, Valley Bar in Phoenix on 3 October, Club Dada in Dallas on 5 October and Brushy Street Commons in Austin on 6 October.

The eastern half of the run takes in the Blue Room at Third Man Records in Nashville on 9 October, The Masquerade's Hell room in Atlanta on 10 October, the Black Cat in Washington DC on 13 October and the Knockdown Center in New York on 14 October. The White Oak Music Hall upstairs room in Houston on 7 October has been cancelled. After that the calendar crosses back to Europe for a headline date at Le Silencio in Paris on 4 November.

The rooms are small — clubs in the few-hundred range rather than theatres — and roughly 1,900 people are currently tracking the band for concert alerts. That is the honest scale of it: a debut album with real critical traction, a support slot in front of somebody else's audience most nights, and a second record being written between the drives.