Berlin-based singer-songwriter Oskar Brandt makes an assured introduction with ‘Now or Never’, a cinematic piece of orchestral pop that places emotional storytelling firmly at the centre. Sweeping piano, expressive strings and carefully layered instrumentation give the track an expansive quality, but its impact comes from the intimacy at its core. Brandt is less interested in grand gestures than in allowing complicated feelings to breathe, creating a song that feels suspended between heartbreak, hope and the uncertainty of what comes next.
There is a clear cinematic instinct running through Brandt’s songwriting. Drawing on the emotional scale of film scores and musical theatre while sitting comfortably alongside contemporary pop influences such as RAYE, Sam Smith and OneRepublic, he builds arrangements that feel designed to carry a narrative. ‘Now or Never’ is particularly effective in this respect. Its subject is familiar, a relationship strained by personal struggles and the possibility of finding a way back, but Brandt resists reducing that tension to an easy resolution.
Instead, the track gradually opens out around his vocal. Soft and vulnerable in its quieter moments, his delivery gains authority as the orchestration gathers momentum, creating a natural contrast between the exposed songwriting and the widescreen production. The strings are particularly important to that progression, adding movement and emotional weight without overwhelming the melody.
That sense of scale is helped by the calibre of the musicians involved. Acclaimed cellist Dave Eggar brings an organic quality to the arrangement, while producer Heather Holley helps keep the production focused on the emotional centre of the song. Their contributions complement rather than distract from Brandt’s own perspective, allowing the orchestral elements to function as part of the storytelling rather than simply as decoration.
What makes ‘Now or Never’ most intriguing, though, is the sense that Brandt is establishing a musical language rather than simply presenting a debut single. His approach sits somewhere between contemporary pop songwriting and the heightened emotional world of cinema, with atmosphere playing as important a role as the words themselves. There is room here for these songs to work on their own terms while also possessing the kind of visual quality that naturally lends itself to film and television.
As introductions go, ‘Now or Never’ offers a convincing glimpse of an artist with a defined creative direction. Brandt understands the power of restraint as much as he does orchestral scale, and that balance gives the track its emotional pull. Rather than offering neat answers, he leaves the listener somewhere inside the uncertainty, and that unresolved space proves to be the song’s most compelling quality.
