There are songs you hear, and then there are songs you enter—slowly, completely, like stepping into a fog-draped forest or watching snowfall through an open window. On June 3, 2025, composer Grant Borland—under his new solo project Soek—released Scania, a debut single that unfolds like a memory, tender and vast, built from the hush of Icelandic landscapes and the quiet resonance of human emotion.
Borland is no stranger to sonic storytelling. With an impressive portfolio that includes scoring for Netflix, Apple TV, and Disney+, he’s spent years crafting music that enhances the visual. But with Soek, he flips the equation—now, the music is the vision. Free from narrative constraints, Scania lets sound lead the story, and the result is breathtaking.
Inspired by a trip to Iceland, Scania is both a tribute to a place and a meditation on presence. From the first note, it invites you to slow down. The arrangement is deceptively simple: glacial piano motifs drift across a delicate bed of electronic textures, while live strings—performed with aching precision by Martin Kutnar and captured by Session Strings Studio—carry the emotional core. Each element is spacious, restrained, and deliberate, like nature itself. You feel the cold, the awe, the silence.
There’s a patient confidence in Scania that sets it apart. In a world of instant gratification and dramatic drops, Soek doesn’t rush. Instead, the track builds gradually, layering nuance upon nuance, leading the listener not to a climax, but to a kind of emotional clarity. It’s a sonic echo of Iceland’s landscapes: minimal, majestic, and always shifting.
You can hear the fingerprints of Borland’s influences—Max Richter’s emotional minimalism, Ólafur Arnalds’ fusion of the organic and synthetic—but Scania never imitates. Instead, it speaks its own language, one built from Soek’s clear artistic intent and Borland’s deft production choices. Electronic pulses blend with analog warmth, while the masterful touch of Piotr Wieczorek (renowned for his work with artists across the ambient and classical spectrum) ensures that every sonic detail finds its place in the mix.
But what truly elevates Scania isn’t just its production polish or technical grace—it’s its ability to feel. There’s a raw, wordless beauty here that sticks with you long after the final note fades. It’s the soundtrack to a moment you haven’t lived yet, the kind of piece that quietly soundtracks your thoughts on a long drive or beneath a starless sky.
Scania is more than just a debut. It’s a statement of purpose. It introduces Soek as not merely a side project or creative detour, but as a serious force in the modern classical and experimental electronic scene. It’s music that doesn’t shout for attention—it earns it, slowly and irrevocably. In a saturated world, Soek carves out stillness and space, proving that sometimes, the most powerful thing a song can do is breathe.
As the first offering from Soek, Scania sets the tone for what promises to be a deeply affecting musical journey—one where genre boundaries blur, emotions take center stage, and sound becomes landscape. If this is just the beginning, we can only imagine where Soek will take us next.
In the meantime, press play on Scania, close your eyes, and let the cold winds of Iceland wrap around you. You’re not just listening—you’re arriving.
