Photo by Elliot Bergman

On May 7th, Natalie Bergman will release her debut solo album, Mercy (Third Man Records), and today she shares its latest preview with new single and video “Home At Last.” As the first song she wrote for the LP, “Home At Last” is one of Mercy’s most emotionally gripping moments, a personal and potent cry for hope during a period of profound sadness. Throughout the record’s 12 spiritual and self-produced tracks, Bergman often sings about “home” and the idea of her own Paradiso or Heaven, as the belief in that place was her greatest consolation following the fatal accident that led her to create this album. 

It was October 2019 when Natalie Bergman and her brother were about to take the stage at Radio City Music Hall, together in their band Wild Belle, until receiving news that their father and stepmother were killed by a drunk driver. Their sudden death sent Bergman’s mind into a whirling chaos, but she had a desperation to know where they had gone. On “Home At Last” she recounts the experience, and in tender swells of hypnotic harmonies she asks, “Answer my prayer, when a great man falls and the skies collapse, where’s the joy in this world, is he home at last?” 

Listen to “Home At Last” here, and watch the music video, a beautiful performance filmed against the sylvan, stained-glass backdrop of an abandoned chapel

Read more about the song in a new feature with FLAUNT, where Bergman says: 

“I have always written songs about ‘home.’ A place that is not on this earth. It brings me a great deal of comfort knowing that place is waiting for me - especially when life can be so alienating and lonely...In the video for ‘Home At Last’ I found a small chapel in Los Angeles and the moment I saw the stained-glass I felt like it belonged to me. One of the best things about making music is sharing it with the people you love. Playing it with your friends and family. I invited my favorite artists to be a part of this performance and I asked them to think about what heaven might look like to them.”

Across Mercy, Natalie Bergman invites listeners into her “land of milk and honey, a place where there’s more than enough salvation to go around” (The FADER). In the aftermath of her family’s tragic loss she decided to spend weeks in silence at a monastery in the southwestern desert, and in interviews with HERO and BUST she describes how the retreat ultimately inspired her to embark on the album. Pulsing with redemptive power, the record delivers cathartic visions of healing and uplift, “serving as a psychedelic prayer for a more hopeful future” (MTV News). 

Watch the video for Mercy standout “Shine Your Light On Me,” a dazzling tribute to classic TV performances of the 1960s, directed by Alan Del Rio Ortiz (Solange, Maggie Rogers) and filmed by Ben Chappell (Arctic Monkeys, King Krule).

See some of Natalie Bergman’s stunning artwork in “Talk To The Lord,” from stacks of symbolic sculptures to a stirring series of hand-sewn flags.