B-Side Guys

“If you feel like doing nothing / I’ll do nothing with you.” Most songs about supporting a depressed partner reach for the grand gesture. Jonathan Kotik goes the other direction and finds something more honest: the willingness to match someone’s stillness rather than try to move them out of it.

Kotik wrote “Getting Thru” while lying awake next to his then-partner during the pandemic, and the lyric carries that hour’s specific texture. Blue light on the ceiling, tears without warning, yoga in the morning just to get moving, “mood depends on weather” as a plain statement of fact rather than a metaphor. The song doesn’t try to dramatize what depression feels like from the outside. It just reports back from the room.

The folk-indie production suits the material without calling attention to itself. Kotik, a London-based multi-instrumentalist who engineers his own work, keeps the arrangement close and uncluttered, which mirrors the lyric’s refusal to inflate the stakes. The Bon Iver and Alex G influences in his broader catalog are audible in the sonic approach, that combination of emotional directness and careful texture, but “Getting Thru” is simpler than either of those reference points, and deliberately so.

The chorus hinge, “once you say it / you’re getting thru,” doesn’t promise recovery. It just marks the act of naming the feeling as the first navigable step. And then the penultimate line does the thing the rest of the song has been building toward without announcing it: “you don’t have to be okay.” Four years of being present for someone, distilled into the one sentence that actually helps.