I’m writing this from my home in Saint-Lazare, and Magi Merlin is from here too. It’s a family-suburb kind of town, which makes POWER HOUSE feel even more like a deliberate breach. Then the record starts, and it stops mattering.
This album moves like it’s been made by someone who refuses to stay in one frame long enough for the listener to get comfortable. The idea of a “debut” doesn’t capture that. POWER HOUSE doesn’t arrive with introductions. It arrives mid-stride, already in motion, already changing its mind.
I caught Merlin at Osheaga and it was the confidence that stayed with me, not as a persona, more like a stance. Not long after, she did a cover of Idles, one of my favourite bands, and it clicked for a different reason. Merlin can handle abrasion without turning it into purity theatre. The aggression still dances. The fun still bites.
Merlin has called this sound “broken R&B,” and it fits, not because the songs feel unfinished, but because they feel deliberately assembled from pieces that should not behave this well together. The record keeps snapping between textures, flirting with pop shine, then bending it until it looks strange again. Even when a hook lands clean, there’s usually something behind it that keeps shifting, some sideways detail in the vocal, and some production choice that makes the surface wobble.
The early stretch hits fast. SpiceKick comes in with strut and threat, Merlin dropping “My music’s batshit / Paid for your casket” like it’s a punchline that turns into a warning halfway through. POPSTAR circles the pressure of being visible and the uneasy duty that comes with performing a self in public, and it never has to slow down to make its point. The commentary shows up in the momentum, not in a pause for explanation.
pixxxie is where Merlin’s writing turns the knife with a smile. It plays inside the manic pixie dream girl trap long enough to show you the wiring and then starts pulling at it. The vocal feels close and multiplied, like the song is crowding you on purpose. Lines like “I’m baked in your plans / Break them for me” land with a kind of theatrical exhaustion, an irony that doesn’t protect anyone but just makes the room brighter so you can see what’s happening.
Elsewhere, the album’s wildness is its method. It loves escalation. It loves the hard left. It keeps dragging social observation back into the body, back into the club, back into the mess of wanting attention and resenting the price of it. There are moments that flirt with “concept,” extra framing devices that try to stitch everything into one neat read, and they can feel like overhandling. The songs don’t need the help. The strongest parts of POWER HOUSE are the ones that don’t resolve, that stop short, that leave the thought hanging because that’s what the mind actually does when it’s telling the truth.
For all its maximalism, POWER HOUSE doesn’t feel like a flex. It feels like an argument for contradiction as a form of self-knowledge, not a problem to be fixed. Merlin doesn’t file the edges down. The album keeps its sharpness. It also keeps its grin.
If Merlin brings even a fraction of this nervous confidence and jagged humour to the stage, the 17 September show at Foufounes Électriques should feel less like a tour stop and more like a room change, the kind that leaves you a little altered on the way out.
POWER HOUSE is out today via Bonsound.
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