In This Room by Hannah Schneider – Album Review
By Ellie Victor
Written and recorded during a two-month residency at Thorvaldsens Museum in Copenhagen, In This Room arrives with a concept that could easily have curdled into art-school homework. Instead, Hannah Schneider uses the museum’s historic rooms as both instrument and provocation, flipping her usual process on its head and asking what happens when acoustic sounds become the engine for modern electronic music. The answer is a record that feels tactile and elusive: warm breath, cool stone and circuitry flickering in the half-light.
It also makes sense that this album leans closer to the adventurous electronics of her AyOwA project than to her earlier solo work. There is a constant push and pull between organic and synthetic elements, as if human hands are wrestling gently with the machine and, crucially, enjoying the contest. With fellow guests including Christian Balvig and Caspar Clausen passing through the sessions, the record often feels communal without ever losing Schneider’s singular, slightly slanted vision.
Opener ‘Starry Void’ throws the doors open with fearless intent. It is all the genres at once, or at least several of them crowding into the same beautiful room without anyone stepping on anyone else’s toes. There is an electro pulse, a wall of sound, a kind of stargazing ambience, and breakbeats that keep tugging the track away from pure reverie. It plays like Sigur Rós dragged blinking and terrified into a nightclub, or My Bloody Valentine remixed by Oneohtrix Point Never during a sleepless night. As opening gambits go, it is bold to the point of cheeky.
Hannah Schneider, 2026
“Quietly mesmerising”
‘Lighthouse’ follows by changing the temperature rather than the method. It skitters like a pebble across water, light on its feet and quietly mesmerising, with a chilled drift that suggests a horizon viewed through sea mist. Schneider is not particularly interested in delivering obvious hooks on a silver platter, and that becomes even clearer on ‘Membrane’, a dark, foreboding piece that feels like Bauhaus and Portishead passing stems back and forth in a candlelit basement. It is dense with mood, but never clogged. Texture is doing the heavy lifting.
The featherweight ‘Fire’ is one of the album’s loveliest moments, an ambient miniature illuminated by a snaking synth flare that cuts through the haze. Schneider has a gift for these subtle little moves, the sort that stop a track from dissolving into pure atmosphere and give it a pulse, a shape, a memory.
‘The Apartment’ is the emotional centre of the album, and perhaps its most striking track. There is a glacial Nordic beauty to it, the music almost too quiet, too poised, as though it might disappear if anyone in the room exhales too heavily. Then a wistful cello slips in and changes the weather entirely. When Schneider sings, “Somebody say something”, it lands somewhere between wry aside and genuine plea. Either way, it is arresting.
“Atmosphere”
The title track continues the record’s fascination with imbalance and grace. It is swooning, slightly woozy, full of off-kilter beauty, as though the whole song is moving on a hidden axis just beneath the floorboards. It should not quite hold together, and yet it does. That tension is part of the thrill.
‘Fragrant Stars’ floats by on an unclassifiable ether before closer ‘Some Living Rooms In The Evening’ quietly steals the show. Where much of the album deals in atmosphere and suggestion, this final piece finds a strange sweet spot between experimental poise and something approaching an earworm. It is as if Brian Eno woke from Thursday Afternoon humming a melody he could not quite explain.
For all its conceptual framing, In This Room never feels dutiful or academic. It is sensuous, strange and often gorgeous, a record more concerned with mood and movement than instant gratification. Hannah Schneider has made an album that seems to breathe with the rooms that shaped it, and in doing so she has turned a cerebral idea into something richly human.
4.0 out of 5.0 stars
Ellie has spent over three decades dissecting riffs, rhythms, and rockstar egos, all in pursuit of the perfect review. Her music writing journey began at 12 with a glowing 10/10 diary entry for Echo and the Bunnymen, and she’s been chasing that high ever since. Armed with encyclopaedic knowledge and a soft spot for the sonically daring, Ellie will review anything that’s put in front of her – as long as it’s on vinyl.
