Amanda Bergman – ’embraced for a second as we die’ album review: All in perfect harmony
On embraced for a second as we die, Amanda Bergman delivers a devastatingly beautiful exploration of life right before death.
The Skinny: Drifting through the haze of a warming, swirling faintness of an echo of a song you could have sworn you’d heard before comes the weather-worn, aching but beautiful voice of Amanda Bergman on the opener from her new album, embraced for a second as we die, ‘common, like the end’.
Released in January 2026, everything about the soundscape invokes a sound of a distant 1980s, but with a much more modern – or at least, much more advanced – production style. Both in her voice and in her music (and, at times, incredibly with her lyrics), Bergman invokes the feeling of Joni Mitchell, and nowhere more so than in the oaky husk as she sings the opening lines on the second song ‘mexico’, or in the highest notes that she reaches for on ‘grasp’.
The record feels like a modern-day update on Kim Carnes’ classic ‘Bette Davis Eyes’ or else on Mitchell’s Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm album from 1988, but also like a more modern update on one of her own earlier works.
Maybe you’d better know Amanda Bergman by her old stage-name Idiot Wind (after the Bob Dylan song, from his seminal Blood on the Tracks, an album which she playfully namechecks here on ‘grasp’), or else maybe you know her as a part of the indie dream-pop duo Amason. Their brilliant debut album, Sky City, was awash in future/present/past soundscapes; caught somewhere between sounds and somewhere between times. Full of fascinating and engaging movements of sound and style. Awash with dreamy, mystical, hypnotic melodies and countermelodies; dreamy, mystical and hypnotic atmospheres.
On embraced for a second as we die, Bergman returns to and expands upon the best of Sky City, moving away from the more electronic elements from the older album and replacing them with a more timeless blend of earthy, acoustic tones on guitars and pianos and drums, bass and organ. In reality, this album is really a lot like that older one, only maybe more so.
Bergman has clearly got an excellent ear for a hook, for a memorable melody, and for an interesting chord progression or key change, but doesn’t want to push it. Nothing is in your face here. Take it or leave it, this is not an album that will force itself upon you, but which will captivate you and beguile you into the depths of the record.
There is beauty and brutality to be found and heard in here. There is agony, and there is anguish, but there is also joy. There is a lot of joy to be heard in the songs.
Nick Cave sang in one of his recent songs that “we’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy,” but here, Amanda Bergman says it and sings it better than that, over and over again.
The Verdict: Listen for yourself, then listen again and again. This is an album for the ages, and one that will mean more to you as the years go by, but one which also deserves your time right now.
Best Song: ‘grasp’
Release Date: January 16th, 2026 | Producer: Petter Winnberg | Label: The Satchi Six
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