Amanda Bergman has today announced that she will release her third album “embraced for a second as we die” on 16th January via The Satchi Six & Arketyp. Following her return with the video for ‘Grasp’ earlier this month, she has today also shared lead singles ‘Mexico’ and ‘is this how you said you’d be gone’ Speaking of ‘Mexico’ Amanda says:
“‘Mexico’ captures the essence of a lot of the music I’ve loved and listened to over the years.
It’s about the internal push and pull between self-erasure and adaptive surrender — a tension I believe many of us experience in intimate relationships, whether healthy or damaging.”
Speaking of ‘is this how you said you’d be gone’ Amanda says”:
“‘is this how you said you’d be gone’ is a song about the stunned stillness after sudden loss, how loss and grief sometimes rearranges your life, and its very infrastructure. Some relationships – even when someone has died or drifted away – can feel just as vivid,
Sometimes even more so, than those still present. For me, the inner conversations I have with my dad and grandma, for example, can feel as real as birdsong, even though they are long since gone. I’ve stopped questioning it and instead learned to use it – not unlike how I’d honour my children’s fantasies, not for their content but for their truth. Sometimes the body and the mind agree on a kind of truth that logic can’t touch.”
Embraced for a second as we die follows up 2024’s “Your Hand Forever Checking On My Fever” for which Amanda won two Swedish GRAMMY awards, ‘Lyricist of the Year’ and ‘Singer/Songwriter of the Year’.
Amanda describes “Embraced…” in short as a display of “love as resistance. Across relationships – romantic, familial, ancestral – love is portrayed as/assumed to be the only force that still feels real amid chaos”. The title alludes to the theory (“whether it’s true or not doesn’t matter”) that the brain releases a flood of DMT in our final moments. She says, “embraced for a second as we die” isn’t about death so much as it’s about that imagined moment of clarity – the second when everything, for once, makes sense. For me, that’s the image. In my own search for answers, there’s also a kind of realisation – or maybe comfort – in knowing that, okay, whether I choose to become a pirate or a Buddhist, there’s still a pretty good chance it’ll all end the same way anyway”.
The album was written by Amanda and the music arranged by her and her partner Petter Winnberg with the intent in mind of the live recording reaching its full potential and making up most of the final product. This was then recorded in two sessions at Atlantis Metronome – the old ABBA studio in Stockholm.
On her new album, Amanda Bergman tries to grasp the present moment as it unfolds. The personal and the political, the quiet little moments, a world seemingly on the verge of implosion. But also the passage of time, people who disappear, love as an act of resistance, and the strange mix of euphoria and despair that comes from simply being alive right now.
The Fat Angel Sings 