Gia Margaret – Good Friend

Gia Margaret is a Chicago singer-songwriter, pianist, and composer who had to discover her voice by losing it. Her 2018 debut There's Always Glimmer was well received, but a vocal injury in 2019 left her unable to sing for years. She did not stop making music — she changed languages. The two largely instrumental albums she made in that time, 2020's Mia Gargaret and 2023's Romantic Piano, are built from piano, synths, and pure sound, and Romantic Piano's "Hinoki Wood" found a second, viral life online. Jagjaguwar's album notes put it plainly: "There was a time when I really didn't know if I would sing again."

Her voice did heal, and Singing — released April 24, 2026, on Jagjaguwar, and recorded in London, Eau Claire, and Chicago in 2024 and 2025 — is her first vocal album since 2018. The title is literal, and hard-won.

"Good Friend" is track seven, the bright centre of the record, and it was released ahead of the album with a video directed and edited by Guy Kozak. The song is about trying to be a good friend across a distance. It opens with a friend home sick with the flu, the singer "all the way in Chicago," and it keeps returning to a small, modern image of care arriving from far away — "I'm on a bus to work / Full day ahead / A flash of light from a message you send." Her answer to the distance is the song itself: "I want to be a good friend so I'm writing a song for you."

What makes it unlike anything else on the album is how many ideas it holds at once without spilling any of them. Margaret made it in London with Frou Frou's Guy Sigsworth, who helped her unify what Jagjaguwar calls "the spree of ideas she had for 'Good Friend'" — the finished track includes Gregorian chant by ILĀ and turntable scratches, and the credits add Sigsworth on drums, bass, harpsichord, synths, and tablas. The FADER described it as a song that "starts off a little trip-hop and ends with Gregorian chants, keeping up an irresistible groove all the while." Margaret has said she brought the song from a very buried place, and that Sigsworth encouraged her to say every idea she had — and loved them. She also felt the album needed this one to break things up, because the second half of Singing is pretty heavy.

That is the lovely tension in "Good Friend": a quiet, intimate singer, back from years of silence, making the most playful track on her comeback record — a song about friendship that is itself an act of friendship.

— Red Hector