Don’t you know I could love you better
Be your release when you’re under pressure
All that you hold, we could hold together
I could be, I would be if you let me
Somewhere inside I Could Love You is a person pacing around a room, rehearsing the case for why somebody ought to love them back. Every argument has already been prepared: I understand you, I can carry some of this weight, I can protect you, I can give you something better. None of it changes the verdict. With this new single, Midniter takes us somewhere between genuine tenderness and the dangerous confidence of believing you know what another person needs.
Nic Pugh sings it without burying himself beneath theatrical anguish. The melody keeps drawing him toward the same impossible proposition, while piano and synthesizers give the track a strange openness, almost too much room for these thoughts to wander around unchecked. You can hear why Pugh calls it a ballad, although its emotional center feels closer to fixation slowly becoming aware of itself.
“I Could Love You came from an old piano tune that I never finished,” Pugh reflects. “The bookends of the song are directly from that idea, with the middle evolving into a more synthpop direction for Midniter. To me, it’s a pretty standard ballad about unrequited love – a tale as old as time that everyone can understand.”
The interesting part is how quickly “I could love you” changes meaning when repeated often enough. At first it sounds generous. Later it begins carrying frustration, entitlement, bargaining, hope, and the awful knowledge that intimacy cannot be argued into existence. Pugh keeps returning to the same emotional doorstep because leaving would require admitting that closeness has limits, and that another person can feel affection without crossing the line you desperately want erased.
The video carries on this uncertainty, and wisely leaves plenty unexplained. Dustie Bayer moves through quiet Charlotte locations while dancers Audrey Baran, Faith Centa, and Donovan Granville turn physical proximity into something unstable. Bodies meet, separate, lean toward one another, then occupy their own space again. Pugh appears with Joe Boyland and Dan Hitzelberger behind a backlit white bedsheet, reduced to silhouettes, as though desire itself has flattened everyone involved into shapes onto which meaning can be projected.
“The video is more ambiguous, playing with the question, ‘Is this about desire, obsession, or both?’ It’s ultimately your call to make. Our goal with this video was to focus more on mood than narrative. It was more important to live in these feelings of distance and longing than explain why they linger. The dancers, our friends from Baran Dance, were instrumental in carrying those moods throughout the video with their choreography. Our main actress Dustie Bayer was also incredible in her debut.”
Watch below:
Loving somebody from afar can feel noble when told from inside your own head. Midniter lets enough doubt creep into the room to make that certainty increasingly difficult to trust.
I Could Love You is out now, coinciding with the launch of vinyl LP pre-orders for Xeno through SugarTank! Records’ new website. Xeno will be released on 27 October 2026. Listen to I Could Love You below and order the track here.
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