Amanda Bergman is very well connected in the Swedish music scene. She sang for Lykke Li, is part of the all-star band Amason, is friends with super producer Max Martin – and then the Swedish car manufacturer Volvo used one of her pieces for an advertising clip. A first solo album was released in 2016, the second came eight years later, now she seems to have found her rhythm as a singer/songwriter, because just a year and a half later comes album number three: EMBRACED FOR A SECOND AS WE DIE.
The title shows: A celebration of good humor is not to be expected here. The songs are about losses that Bergman recently suffered. People died or drifted away. Humanistic certainties are being tested or have long been lost. The artist processes these experiences in dreamy songs in which Fleetwood Mac’s soft rock plays just as much a role as art pop, Nordic Americana or dream pop.
Pieces like “Grasp” or “Groby” are particularly successful, on which Bergman sings to the reverberated electric guitar almost as casually and at the same time as urgently as Stevie Nicks. At the end of the album, Amanda Bergman even finds a solution to the threatening backdrop of losses, namely finding inner peace: “Ours Is A Silent Gun”.
This review appears in Musikexpress 2/2026.