Jazz Dreams: Fine builds a collage and lets it argue
Fine's second album cuts jazz collage, seventies radio-rock and minimalist folk into thirteen tracks and refuses to smooth the joins. The running order costs it.
BY JOLT Staff · OCT 25 2026 · 2 min readFine's second album is built out of interruptions, and the interruptions are the good part. Thirteen tracks written, recorded, produced and mixed by Fine Glindvad Jensen with nobody else in the room, out through Escho on 23 October, setting jazz-shaped collage beside seventies radio-rock and minimalist folk with no apology in between. It could have been a mess. It holds together.
Jensen records as Fine. Rocky Top Ballads, her debut, landed in 2024, and this one follows eighteen months of work done in public: early versions played live, demos and alternate takes surfacing through her NTS Radio residency, six tracks released as singles ahead of the album. She announced it on 2 September 2026 with Everything in the Shade. Emil Thomsen mastered it; everything upstream of the master is Jensen. She has described the record as a collage of stacked perspectives, built to unfold like a jazz improvisation, and named Paul's Boutique, Carole King and Scott Walker behind it.
The titles run on movement and time: Get In, Run, Any Minute, Moment, Million Years. The Thing opens with the least descriptive title available and leaves before it settles. I Could, third, works as a signal, all jangle and forward push. Sometimes I Rush is ninety seconds dropped where a full song should sit. Goodbye Brain says farewell to the organising mind that would have tidied the whole thing, and Much to Say closes on the joke of staying brief.
The cost sits in the running order. Five of the six singles land in the back half, and Run, Moment, Everything in the Shade and Portal arrive one after another, so the second act plays like a reminder. The unpredictability that makes the first half snap becomes, by track ten, a set of things you already know. A record that wants to behave like a dream keeps waking you to point at the scenery.
It is for anyone who took Rocky Top Ballads seriously and wants to hear the same writer stop protecting the songs. If you want the folk kept folk and the rock kept straight, the collage will read as evasion. The joins stay audible and the sources are digested. The restlessness earns its keep.
