Jeremy Olander Steps Into a New Chapter With His Debut Album, 'When The Rain Falls'

With the release of his long-awaited debut album When The Rain Falls, Swedish DJ, producer and founder of Vivrant, Jeremy Olander presents a body of work that captures the full scope of his creative identity.

For an artist who has spent much of his career shaping dance floors through EPs, club tracks and DJ sets, the album represents something deeper, a personal checkpoint forged through years of artistic growth and life transformation.

“I see it as a checkpoint more than a destination,” Olander says of the project. “For a long time my output has been tied closely to DJ culture, tracks built for sets, EPs, remixes. This album is the first time I’ve stepped back and presented a fuller picture of where I am creatively.”

Released fifteen years after his breakthrough debut on Pryda Friends, the label run by Swedish icon Eric Prydz, the album marks the culmination of a journey that began in a bedroom studio and gradually unfolded onto some of the world’s most iconic stages.

Olander’s entry into the global electronic scene came through a connection that would shape his early artistic philosophy. “I had friends that knew him and people around him that sent some of my early music to him,” he recalls of his first interactions with Prydz. “I think at that time he was playing around with the idea of building on Pryda Friends and releasing more music from others on there, so luck and timing played a part too.”

Being welcomed into Prydz’s musical orbit proved formative. It offered not only exposure but also a lesson in patience and craft that continues to inform Olander’s approach today. “What I learned most from being around him was patience and attention to detail,” he says. “Every sound has a reason to exist. That mindset stayed with me. It also showed me that longevity in this scene doesn’t come from rushing things.”

At a time when countless producers were competing for recognition, simply being heard presented a challenge. “There was and still is just so much music coming out and it’s hard to get anyone’s attention long enough for them to really listen,” Olander explains. “Probably even more so now than when I started out.”

Credibility, he notes, was equally difficult to establish. “When you’re young people often assume you’re just another bedroom producer chasing trends. So you have to prove that you’re serious about doing your own thing and try to give people a reason to stop and check you out.”

One of the earliest signs that his music was beginning to resonate beyond the underground came with the success of his track “Let Me Feel,” which climbed into the Beatport Top 10 and exposed his music to a much wider audience.

At the time, however, Olander was still searching for his identity as an artist. “I was still figuring things out,” he says. “At the time you celebrate those milestones but you don’t necessarily understand what they mean yet.”

In hindsight, the success opened important doors. “Looking back it definitely helped open doors, more DJs playing the music, bigger rooms, more international shows. But creatively I was still very much in the process of discovering what my sound actually was.”

There was also a certain danger in early success. “Those early successes are exciting, but they’re also a bit dangerous because you can easily start chasing that reaction instead of focusing on the long game.”

For Olander, the moment the dream truly began to feel real arrived not in the studio but on stage, performing alongside Prydz at New York’s legendary Madison Square Garden. “You go from making music in your bedroom to suddenly standing in front of thousands of people in one of the most iconic venues in the world,” he says.

Yet strangely, the true turning point wasn’t necessarily the biggest show. “The moment it felt like a real career wasn’t one of the biggest shows,” he reflects. “It was when the touring started to become consistent, when you realise you’re getting on planes every weekend and people are actually showing up to hear your music.”

Despite more than a decade of releases across labels such as Anjunadeep, Drumcode and Diynamic, Olander had never felt compelled to produce a full-length album until now Part of the reason lies in the nature of club culture itself. “Singles and EPs are great for club culture because they’re very immediate,” he says. “You write something, test it, release it and move on.”

An album, however, demands a fundamentally different mindset. “An album forces you to slow down. You start thinking about pacing, contrast, how one piece of music leads into another. It becomes less about individual tracks and more about creating a full world for the listener to step into.”

The idea for When The Rain Falls began with dozens of sketches. “I started a pretty long time ago to work on a lot of different sketches,” Olander explains. “Just getting ideas, emotions and vibes down. I think I had upwards of thirty-five ideas at some point.”

Eventually, he stepped away from touring for several months to focus entirely on shaping the project. “I pretty much took the better part of four months completely off touring to finish everything.”

As the music developed, a shared emotional thread began to reveal itself. “After a while I realised a lot of the music I was writing shared the same emotional palette,” he says. “There was a certain mood running through everything, a mix of introspection, melancholy and optimism.”

The album was created during a period of profound personal change for Olander, including becoming sober and stepping into fatherhood. “This album reflects a period of reassessing things in my life, how I work, how I live and what matters,” he explains.

Years of touring had inevitably taken their toll. “Over the years touring and the music industry can pull you in many directions, and at some point you have to step back and decide what you want your relationship with all of it to be.”

That process of reflection became embedded in the music itself. “The album carries that process inside it. There are moments that feel introspective and almost fragile, but there’s also a sense of forward motion.”

Once Olander realised he was creating an album rather than a collection of tracks, sequencing became a central part of the creative process. When asked how intentional the narrative arc was, he tells us; “Once I realised it was an album, sequencing became almost as important as the music itself.”

He spent considerable time considering how listeners would enter and exit the record. “It’s not a literal story, but emotionally there’s definitely an arc, moments of tension, moments of release and maybe a sense of resolution toward the end.”

Certain tracks became anchors that helped define the sonic boundaries of the project. “Once those tracks existed they set the emotional boundaries for the rest of the album,” he explains. “Whenever I wrote something new I would ask myself whether it belonged in that world or not.”

Known for balancing progressive house melody with darker techno undertones, Olander used the album format to broaden his sonic palette. “I allowed myself to move a little further away from typical DJ structures,” he says.

While some tracks remain designed for the dance floor, others venture into more cinematic territory. “Some tracks are still very much designed for the dance floor, but others are more cinematic or textural,” he explains. “I explored different tempos, more melodic writing and arrangements that don’t necessarily revolve around a drop.”

Releasing the album through his own label Vivrant provided the creative freedom necessary for such a personal project. “With your own label there’s no external pressure to shape the music in a particular way,” Olander says. “I knew early on this was going to be a personal project, so I couldn’t have random people telling me to change this or add that.”

It also allowed him to resist the industry’s tendency toward formulaic singles. “I don’t mind vocals,” he adds, “but this was never going to become an album with five or six radio singles.”

Olander views When The Rain Falls as the beginning of a new creative chapter. “It’s the start of a new phase,” he says. “Once you’ve allowed yourself to think in album terms it changes how you approach music going forward. It opens new possibilities creatively.”

Genre labels, meanwhile, remain secondary to the emotional core of the music. “I’ve never been too interested in chasing the waves of a genre,” he explains. “Melodic and progressive music has always gone through cycles, but the emotional core of it never really disappears.”

For Olander, that emotional connection remains the guiding principle. “The focus has always been on atmosphere, melody and storytelling in the music,” he says. “As long as those elements resonate with people, the music will always find its place.”

With When The Rain Falls and a global tour now underway, the Swedish producer isn’t simply reflecting on the past fifteen years, he’s stepping into the next chapter of his evolution.

Read the full interview with Jeremy Olander at The Night Bazaar HERE.