I could have been a wise man
Could have been the one…
Hermidgets has taken an old wound off the shelf, peeled away the dried glue and cheap varnish, and found that it still bleeds when pressed. Their latest single, Could I Be Better, feels like the kind of song that stares into its own earlier incarnation with a crooked, hard-earned grin, then guts it and starts over. The first version, as it turns out, no longer knew enough about pain to tell the truth. That history matters. You can hear it in the bones of the track, in the sense that every line has been rehandled, worried over, stripped clean until all the decorative fat is gone and what’s left is nerve, muscle, and a few bruises that never quite healed right.
The track’s strength comes from the way it circles all the people a person might have been for somebody else: saviour, lover, stooge, safe harbour, evidence of some greater meaning…and then lets those phantoms drift off one by one, until the song is left standing in the cold with its plainest and hardest admission. There is no grand absolution here, no theatrical collapse onto the chaise lounge, no purple plume of romantic ruin. What you get instead is a plainspoken reckoning with the slow humiliation of waking up to yourself again, dragging your body into another day, and finding that the vacancy is still there.
Musically, Hermidgets keeps the frame severe and the feeling fevered. The synths move with a stern, spare elegance, while the beat keeps its measured tread like somebody pacing the kitchen at dawn, too tired to panic and too awake to lie down. There’s a lineage here tied to dark synthpop’s cooler bloodline, but Hermidgets isn’t kneeling at anybody’s altar. The track carries its own weather: private, wintry, and claustrophobic, yet never smothered under studio fog or needless ornament. The arrangement understands restraint in the old dramatic sense, where holding back becomes its own form of pressure.
The black-and-white video deepens that mood without gilding it. By the river, with faces partly withheld and bodies doubled through layered performance, Hermidgets turns anonymity into a kind of spiritual condition. The female figure passing through detachment, collapse, and ascent lends the clip a mournful grace, though even that rise feels provisional, like grace on layaway.
Watch Could I Be Better below:
Self-revision can be savage work. Could I Be Better doesn’t present growth as triumph. It presents it as a question asked in an empty room, where the echo comes back smarter than you were the first time.
Hermidgets previously released The Mire (2020) and NIHIL (2024), gradually shaping a coherent, emotionally resonant artistic identity.
Listen to Could I Be Better below and order the single here.
Could I be better by Hermidgets
Follow Hermidgets:
Website
Instagram
Bandcamp
Spotify
Facebook
The post Hermidgets Faces the Person They Never Were in Video for Somber Synthpop Track “Could I Be Better” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.