The sun on your skin, your head in dark clouds, and your heart in a place you’d rather not think about. That’s Talvez, the new single from Ão and a first taste of the album that is to be released in early 2026 as successor to the widely acclaimed Ao Mar.

Brenda Corijn, Siebe Chau, Jolan Decaestecker and Bert Peyffers continue their journey with a unique blend of saudade, alternative pop, Latin and electronica in Portuguese and English. Now even more refined, with a richer production, deeper and more physical.

Talvez, Portuguese for ‘maybe’, literally came about along the way. After the band took a month’s break, they met up again on tour in Slovenia. Brenda had meanwhile sought refuge in Brazil. “I had said to the others: I can only really relax when I leave with the idea that I’m never coming back. When I sent Siebe an email from there, for a moment, he thought that I really wasn’t coming back.”

The charango – a fiery south American guitar – drapes the song in sunlight, but something brews below the surface. Talvez is a confrontation disguised as a summer melody: the story of someone who has fled from everything and, just when she thinks that she’s left for good, runs into someone from her past. Someone who still knows her as she was. And suddenly she’s back there again, at that place within herself that she was trying to escape.

“Talvez você se lembra da minha escuridão”, which pretty much means "Maybe you only remember my darkness”. You can’t escape who you were, however far you travel.

© Willem Mevis