SINGLE REVIEW: Forgotten Garden – Five Minutes

‘Five Minutes’ unfolds like a memory you didn’t realise was still sitting quietly in the back of your mind—melancholic, fragile, and unshakably beautiful. Forgotten Garden, the Scottish-Portuguese duo with a flair for the haunting, deliver a track that’s both gentle and harrowing, weaving aching emotion into every line and note without ever tipping into melodrama.

The instrumentation here is softly bold—layered with restraint but rich in detail. A deep, steady bassline forms the backbone, giving the track its emotional weight, while the drums add movement without stealing the spotlight. Melodic guitars chime in with a bittersweet glisten, and dark, swirling synths cloak the edges in a hazy dream-state. It’s immersive and subtly theatrical, building its world slowly and deliberately.

At the heart of it all is Inês Rebelo’s voice—raw, expressive, and almost painfully honest. There’s something incredibly powerful in how she holds back; her delivery is gentle and warm, but underneath is a current of grief and quiet desperation. The way her vocals glide over the track adds a ghostly tenderness, pulling you deep into the story of two people who were once everything to each other, now distant strangers without quite knowing how it happened.

Lyrically, it captures that moment of realisation when love has quietly faded—not with fireworks, but with a slow drift. It’s a familiar ache wrapped in a soft, dreamlike shell, and the song doesn’t try to resolve it. Instead, it lingers in that space between longing and acceptance, asking questions it knows won’t be answered.

Despite its sombre tone, ‘Five Minutes’ is an easy listen in the most unexpected way. It’s the kind of song you want to sit with—thoughtful, immersive, and emotionally resonant. Forgotten Garden have carved out a space where sadness and beauty coexist, and this track makes that space feel quietly vast.