Parisian singer-songwriter Gabi Hartmann has a gift for making stillness feel like a full-body experience, and her new single “Roll By” — a duet with Brooklyn-based artist and longtime friend Melissa Mary Ahern — is one of her most quietly devastating offerings yet. Out now, it arrives paired with an acoustic live video that lets every breath, every brushed guitar string, and every harmony hang in the air like sea mist.

“Roll By” details the end of a love story and the strange, hard-won calm that follows. Rather than reach for grand gestures or heartbroken theatrics, Hartmann and Ahern lean into surrender. “It speaks of surrendering to what cannot be changed and allowing life to move forward naturally,” Hartmann says, “just as the waves endlessly roll across the sea.” That maritime metaphor is baked into the song’s DNA — the arrangement drifts and swells with the patience of a tide that has seen a lot and isn’t in any hurry to explain itself.

The pairing of Hartmann and Ahern is a natural one. Both artists trade in intimacy and craft, favoring subtlety over spectacle, and their voices weave together with the ease of two friends finishing each other’s sentences. It’s the kind of collaboration that sounds less like a feature and more like a conversation you’re lucky to overhear.

Stream “Roll By” here: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3fMbdgg4jU18AjLCKBhRSm

The single follows an expanded edition of Hartmann’s acclaimed second album, La femme aux yeux de sel (Le long voyage), reissued earlier this year with eight brand-new bonus tracks after a North American tour. Structured as a three-part tale, the record follows Salinda, a woman from a dream island whose salt eyes melt with every tear she sheds, as she journeys in search of the secrets of salt — and, ultimately, herself. It’s a coming-of-age arc that moves from innocence through disillusionment into serenity, threaded with meditations on nature, vulnerability, anger, wonder, and the healing that only time and travel can provide.

Born in 1991, Hartmann blurs the borders between pop, folk, jazz, soul, and world music, singing across multiple languages and pulling from a lineage of fearless female voices like Miriam Makeba and Mercedes Sosa. Her self-titled 2023 debut racked up more than 20 million streams and 15,000 physical sales, earned her the Golden Disk Award for New International Artist in Japan, and led to collaborations with Jesse Harris, Julian Lage, and Oan Kim, plus main-stage sets at Montreal Jazz Festival, Jazz à Vienne, and Les Francofolies. La femme aux yeux de sel expands that world further with contributions from Naïssam Jalal, Laurent Bardainne, Julia Johansen, and Brazilian composer Maycon Ananias, whose strings light up standout tracks like “Mélancolie.”

“Roll By” is a small, luminous chapter in a much bigger story — and a reminder that some of the strongest statements an artist can make are the ones delivered in a whisper. Press play, let the waves do their thing, and follow Gabi Hartmann on Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook to keep up with what comes next.