GOLA – Piles (2025)
Swedish duo GOLA return with ‘Piles’, a gently glowing follow-up to their debut single ‘Painting By Numbers’, and it’s a track that quietly lodges itself under your skin. Written and recorded in the echo of memory, beginning with a one-take demo in Samuel Berg’s childhood home, complete with background chatter and a half-strung guitar, ‘Piles’ is an intimate meditation on perspective, gratitude, and the quiet work of returning home.
There’s something beautifully unforced about this track. From the first few acoustic strums, you feel like you’re being let in on a conversation between old friends, which, in many ways, you are. GOLA is the reunion project of Samuel Berg and Charlie Johansson, childhood bandmates turned seasoned musicians, who reconnected in a Stockholm basement after years apart. There’s a lived-in warmth here that can’t be faked; the kind of songwriting that comes not from chasing trends, but from sitting still long enough to notice what really matters.
While their debut ‘Painting By Numbers’ garnered airplay on Sweden’s P3 and Ireland’s RTÉ 2FM, ‘Piles’ takes a softer, more introspective route. It feels less like a statement and more like a deep breath. Berg takes lead vocals this time, his voice understated and close, like he’s singing just across the table. You can hear the ache in the pauses, the gratitude hiding in the melody, the way the lyrics unfold like a letter never sent. There’s no chorus hook chasing virality here, just a steady, comforting drift, anchored in the clarity that sometimes only comes when you return to where you started.
With production help from Anton Fernandez, the track builds just enough, layering subtle textures without losing the honesty of that first demo. It’s a song about feeling stuck and realising that maybe everyone else is too. About your mom calling you home, and wondering if you ever really left. In short, it’s about life, not the loud parts, but the spaces in between.
‘Piles’ doesn’t shout to be heard. Instead, it hums with quiet understanding, the way only real friendship and real songwriting can. If this is a taste of GOLA’s upcoming EP, This Is Our Room, then we’re in for something special.
Find out more about GOLA on their Instagram and Spotify.
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