Casually Here - It Was As If
Written, performed, produced, mixed & mastered by Nic Nell
Cover art by Nic Nell
Algebra Records | 31st July 2026
Digital / streaming available here
London-based artist, producer, and mix/mastering engineer Nic Nell returns as Casually Here with It Was As If, his third studio album, due for release July 31st via Algebra Records. The announcement is accompanied by lead single and album opener "Home" - an intricately crafted electronic track in two halves with a brightly boisterous opening giving way to a deeply grounded dancefloor meditation.
Following his acclaimed 2022 album Possible Worlds - which explored bifurcating possible futures at this precarious point in history, garnering features in DJ Mag and Future Music alongside praise from Electronic Sound and Uncut - It Was As If explores wonder closer to home, in the magic of the everyday.
Inspired by childhood memories of bedtime stories, the bookends of Disney films, and a letter from Van Gogh to his brother describing a quiet woodland clearing so heavy with potential that it felt as if a story might unfold at any moment, the title “It Was As If” evokes a feeling of latent magic. It champions imagination and attention, capturing the sense of a world waiting at the edges to be let in.
"Modern life is so busy, it’s easy to find ourselves so caught up in whatever’s shouting loudest for our attention, that we miss the small things,” explains Nell. “The dappled sunlight on a wall or the rippling of the wind through leaves are always just as beautiful as when we really see them in peak open moments, if we’re able to pause and really pay attention. I’ve used that feeling of openness to the moment as a divining rod in the making of this album."
Sonically, this translates into a high-resolution blend of lush, playful synths and tumbling rhythms, combined with intricate sound design, samples, and field recordings, splashed across the canvas, allowing for the organic happenstance of colouring slightly outside the lines, with acoustic instrumentation woven throughout. Infused with an innate optimism, Nell crafted the record to work at varying resolutions of attention - to be enjoyable passively when the brain is focused elsewhere, yet to be as richly engrossing as watching a film when given full attention. This is widescreen music that spans the dancefloor to the meditation mat.
Bringing his technical precision to his solo work, Nell wrote, produced, mixed, mastered, and performed the album in full at his Camberwell studio, tracking everything from its detailed synthwork to stacked layers of live clarinets. Classically trained with a background in mathematics and visual art, his highly detailed, cerebral approach is evident across a multidisciplinary career. As a songwriter, producer, and engineer, his catalogue has generated over 50 million streams. Alongside his own output as one half of art-pop duo Rainer, the collaborative project Young Colossus, and running his experimental label Algebra Records for over a decade, his credits include co-writing and producing Orlando Weeks' A Quickening, collaborative EPs with Lawrence Hart on Hotflush, and work with Art School Girlfriend, porij, and Luke Marzec. Beyond traditional records, his wider creative practice encompasses scoring for film, ongoing sound design for immersive fine art installations, and virtual reality collaborations with artist duo Gibson/Martelli that were featured in the BFI London Film Festival Expanded.
Tracklist:
Home
More
Family
Friendship
Stumble
Tell Me Story
Deep Calm
The Come Hither Of
Plexuses
