On their latest offering ‘Tides’, husband-and-wife duo The Bergamot shape a deeply personal story into a piano-led ballad that moves with patience, restraint and considerable cinematic scale.
The track serves as the first glimpse of the duo’s forthcoming album Before This Is Over, and signals a broader, more orchestral chapter in their work. Produced and mixed by Matt Wiggins, whose credits include Adele, Glass Animals and London Grammar, ‘Tides’ places emotional clarity at the centre while allowing the arrangement to expand gradually around it.
At its core, the song is connected to the late father of vocalist and songwriter Nathaniel Paul. That personal origin gives the material an immediate gravity, but The Bergamot appear less interested in documenting a single memory than in exploring the way loss continues to move through a life. Grief is rarely static. It retreats, returns and changes shape, often resurfacing in moments that initially seem unconnected to the past.
The title captures that movement elegantly. Tides operate according to forces largely beyond human control, repeating their patterns while never arriving in precisely the same form. As a metaphor for memory and mourning, it allows the song to consider emotional recurrence without reducing it to despair.
Piano provides the track’s central structure, creating an intimate opening space in which each phrase can carry its own weight. But rather than forcing the emotion through an immediate climax, the arrangement seems designed to let tension develop naturally. The effect is reflective, even as the sound grows more expansive.
And that balance between intimacy and scale has long been central to The Bergamot’s identity. Nathaniel Paul and Jillian Speece build their music around close vocal connection, but their ambitions regularly reach beyond the confines of conventional folk songwriting. Their harmonies provide a recognisable human centre, while the surrounding production often suggests something wider and more visual.
As the lead single from Before This Is Over, ‘Tides’ also establishes the album’s likely emotional territory. Love, mortality and time are familiar subjects, but the pair approach them with an awareness that large questions often reveal themselves through small, personal moments.
Measured, affecting and built with a strong sense of emotional proportion, the single finds The Bergamot allowing grief to move at its own natural pace. It doesn’t attempt to conquer loss or package it into a simple resolution. Instead, it follows the current, trusting that even the most difficult memories can carry something back to shore.