Magi Merlin

$18 Adv + Fees | 21+

Magi Merlin’s music drifts between weight and levity with exceptional ease, turning from the nuances of intimacy to the realities of capitalism and womanhood. There's no sheen of perfection here, no forced pop polish. Through her propulsive, avant-garde form of R&B she explores love, desire and growth and life’s deep existential truths, moving between splintered kick drums, futuristic synth lines and jungle breakbeats.

Her 2022 EP Gone Girl is music that feels genuinely alive, animated by a voice that blends unruly maximalism and earned wisdom, gliding across the chaos with a precision that only comes from deep intuition. A surprise EP, A Weird Little Dog, followed, arriving as she opened for Nubya Garcia across the US, with festival appearances at Osheaga, Festival d’été de Québec where she opened for Ty Dolla $ign, and most recently a European support run with Yaya Bey. Outside of the music, this spring she is making her acting debut in Chandler Levack’s Mile End Kicks, alongside Barbie Ferreira, Devon Bostick and Juliette Gariépy which screened at TIFF and SXSW.

There’s a special kind of kindred spirit that Magi writes for; her fellow obsessives. Screw the soft launch. Magi sings directly to the listener pressed up against the other side of the screen's glass. POWER HOUSE, her debut album which releases on July 10, is exactly that. A recognition that each person, like the songs themselves, is a powerhouse, an invitation to embrace every aspect of what makes us human, whether that be ego or compassion, because every bit contributes to who we truly are and what we can offer the world. The album explores multiplicity, the idea that we are all so many different things and that they can all live in harmony at the same time.

The album moves through the female experience with both fury and precision. Magi writes from trust, leaning into instinct rather than mapping out the outcome, because to fix the gaze too firmly on one destination is to miss the kind of potential that usually only lives in the periphery. This produced Broken R&B, a genre she named and owns entirely, less a marketing category than an honest account of how she works, accountable to no existing template, her art direction and visual world as idiosyncratic and charged as the music itself. Over the last decade, she has co-written and co-produced largely alongside Funkywhat, a collaborator with whom she has built a shared musical language.