Jazz
Rune Grammofon · 25 September 2026
Eight pieces and thirty-five and a half minutes. The longest, “Winter Is Coming”, runs 5:03 and starts with the double bass alone before the piano comes in to bloom near the end; the shortest, “Another Day”, runs 3:31. There is a minute and a half between them, and that is the shape of the whole record: closed tunes, statement, short development, exit. The trio has been the same from the start — Espen Eriksen on piano, Lars Tormod Jenset on double bass and Andreas Bye on drums, together since You Had Me At Goodbye (2010). Almost There is the first album they have recorded on their own since End of Summer (2020), because the two that sit in between, In the Mountains (2022) and As Good As It Gets (2023), had Andy Sheppard’s saxophone out front, as Perfectly Unhappy (2018) had before them. Without the Englishman, the solo voice is Eriksen’s piano throughout.
The discipline of form is both the house signature and the ceiling here. Not one of the eight tracks reaches five and a half minutes, not one opens into free playing, and eight songs of near-identical size in a row end up flattening the real differences between them: “Ancient Rituals” (4:52) and “A Dream In Black And White” (4:12) start from clearly distinct material and the clock treats them the same. Sixteen years of playing together would earn more than one chance to stretch out.
Eight tracks, thirty-five minutes and fifty seconds, recorded in Oslo and released by Rune Grammofon on 25 September. The album opens with its title track (4:28) and closes with “The Atlantic” (4:24).
Rating: 7.4/10
Text by Aina Torrents