Love can pull you under. It can make logic disappear, leave old wounds behind and convince you to risk your heart all over again. On their new single, “Sink In Love”, Christiaan Baartman and Pedro Barbosa explore every side of that experience — from the pain of letting go to the hope of discovering that love, in all its forms, is ultimately what keeps us alive.
From its opening moments, “Sink In Love” creates an intimate world. A fire burns against the cold, memories flow like red wine and the listener is drawn into a story filled with longing, vulnerability and reflection.
For Pedro, the fire that opens the song was never intended as an elaborate metaphor. It began simply as an image familiar from films — lighting a fire against the cold and creating the setting for a romantic or intimate moment. Yet within the song, that simple scene becomes an invitation into everything that follows: warmth, closeness, memory and the emotional risk that accompanies love.
The song’s emotional roots, however, run considerably deeper.
Rather than emerging from one specific memory, “Sink In Love” was informed by Pedro’s accumulated experiences of relationships, including marriage, divorce and relationships that ultimately did not work out.
Those experiences gave him a particular perspective on the song’s defining idea: “We all sink in love.”
To him, sinking in love can be interpreted as either beautiful or dangerous. When someone truly surrenders to love, there is always the possibility of losing themselves in it.
Love naturally draws people in, Pedro believes. The real challenge is finding someone who understands the vulnerability involved and treasures what has been entrusted to them.
That tension between love and pain is woven throughout the song.
“To love is to hurt. And to hurt is to love,” Pedro explains.
Rather than portraying romance as something untouched by difficulty, “Sink In Love” acknowledges that loving somebody also means accepting the possibility of being hurt. The deeper the connection, the more there is to lose.
Few lyrics capture that vulnerability as clearly as:
“The truth is, I could never just move on.”
For Pedro, the line emerged during a period in which he was struggling to let go of people and experiences from his past. Over time, his understanding of moving on became less about erasing what happened and more about allowing time, healing and something healthier to change the place those memories occupy in your life.
For Christiaan, the same lyric carries another deeply personal meaning.
He believes some of the hardest people to move on from are those with whom we imagined a future that never truly existed. Sometimes the loss is not only of another person, but of everything we believed that relationship might one day become.
“We tend to struggle to move on because we’ve lost something that really never existed,” he explains, adding that he has seen the same struggle reflected in people around him — looking backwards towards what they believed they had, when in reality, “it never was.”
It is precisely this universality that gives the chorus its weight.
When Christiaan sings “We all sink in love,” he draws on the idea that heartbreak is something almost everyone understands.
“The loss of love is a communal theme,” he says. “We’ve all experienced the true heartbreak of losing someone we truly loved, whether through choice or through action.”
And once love takes over, reason does not always remain in control.
“Our logic gives out, our heart starts steering, and sometimes it steers us right into the cliff where the sirens sing.”
Yet “Sink In Love” refuses to remain trapped in heartbreak.
Running alongside the hurt is hope — something Pedro believes becomes particularly important when pain begins to outweigh happiness. The lyric “Love don’t live where hope is sleeping” reflects the idea that hope may become less noticeable during the happiest moments, but it never disappears entirely.
That hope gradually begins changing the emotional landscape of the song.
Old hurt makes room for newfound love, and darkness starts giving way to something lighter.
Pedro says this is characteristic of the way he often writes. While he believes songs should acknowledge the reality of pain, he is naturally drawn towards the possibility of a hopeful ending.
“The world needs real, but with hope,” he says.
Even the writing of “Sink In Love” reflected the message contained in its lyrics.
The lines:
“Write a song and let it flow
You can change the words as you go
Love writes its own melody though”
could almost serve as a description of the creative process behind the track itself.
Pedro recalls sitting down with Christiaan and deciding that they could not force the song into existence. Although he had already written part of it, the collaboration took shape when the two allowed instinct rather than expectation to guide them.
As Pedro describes it, once they “put their hearts together”, the song naturally began to form and “spread its wings”.
The recurring imagery of wind, fire and wildfire developed in much the same way. It was not initially a deliberate device, but became part of the landscape through which they could transport the listener. Those elements give physical form to emotions that are otherwise difficult to describe — the warmth of intimacy, the unpredictability of attraction and the consuming force of love.
The journey reaches its most important moment right at the end.
After repeatedly declaring “We all sink in love,” the lyric changes:
“We all live in love.”
For Pedro, that shift is intentional — and ultimately contains the answer at the heart of the song.
Although “Sink In Love” focuses primarily on romantic love between two people, its final message extends far beyond romance. Love exists between friends, siblings, families and countless other relationships, and Pedro believes people could benefit from becoming far more comfortable expressing it.
Too often, he says, speaking openly about love is treated as something that is not “manly”, or simply something families do not talk about enough.
“Love exists everywhere in different forms and we need more of it in this world.”
That is where “Sink In Love” ultimately leaves its listener.
Yes, love can hurt. It can overwhelm reason, awaken memories and leave people grieving relationships, futures and versions of themselves that no longer exist.
But the answer is not to stop loving.
Because perhaps we all sink in love at some point.
And, if we are fortunate enough to keep choosing it, we also learn to live in it.
