Natalie Bergman – Mercy
Style is the only thing you can’t buy. It’s not in a shopping bag, a label, or a price tag. It’s something reflected from our soul to the outside world, an emotion.
Some records are too raw to be shaped into anything other than what they are. Natalie Bergman’s Mercy is one of them. Written and recorded alone in the aftermath of personal loss, it is a gospel album that strips away performance and theatre, leaving only the ache of grief and the possibility of renewal.
The production is spare throughout. Lo fidelity drum machines tick quietly in the background, organs drift in and out of focus, and layered vocals fill the space like echoes in a homemade chapel. Nothing here is arranged to impress. The instruments act only as a frame for Bergman’s voice, which carries the record from beginning to end.
Her delivery is what makes Mercy striking. On “Shine Your Light on Me” and “Talk to the Lord” she sounds neither rehearsed nor restrained. Instead there is a directness, an openness that makes each song feel less like a performance and more like a personal exchange. She finds faith not in doctrine but in sound itself, allowing presence and clarity to take the place of sermon. It is gospel without the institution, a spiritual record for people who may have long since left the church but still look for something to hold on to.
The power of the album lies in its honesty. You can hear the weight of grief in her voice, but you can also hear the act of continuing, of choosing to sing even when silence might be easier. There is comfort in these songs, but not sentimentality. The comfort comes from the fact that they exist at all.
In the broader landscape Mercy stands apart. Gospel has always carried with it a sense of community, choirs, and collective release. Bergman reshapes that tradition into something solitary and fragile, yet no less moving. The result is a record that feels private while still speaking outward, one that acknowledges pain but refuses to be defined entirely by it.
For TPV this is a reminder of why we listen in the first place. Much of what fills our shelves leans towards the obscure, the murky, the experimental. Yet sometimes a record emerges that cuts through simply because of its sincerity. Mercy is one of those records. Lo fidelity by nature, unpolished in execution, but all the more resonant for it.
It is not an album to play loud. It is one to return to in quiet moments, when the noise has died down and you need to believe again in the power of a single voice set against minimal accompaniment. Bergman may not have set out to make a gospel record for outsiders, but that is what she has created.
