MAGI MERLIN - Power House

Magi Merlin sings “I Am All Things All The Time” and it sounds like a declaration of surrender, not of power. It's the paradox running through her entire debut: strength isn't the absence of contradictions, but the ability to wear them like a second skin. Magi understood this before many of her peers, and she's built an album that doesn't try to resolve the chaos, but to dance inside it, completely at ease.
The term she herself coined, broken R&B, is more than a label — it's practically a method. Singing that breaks into spoken word, choruses that collapse in on themselves mid-pose, characters who issue orders while begging to be held together. The Canadian musician takes the coordinates of rhythm'n'blues and decomposes them, shatters them, reassembles them into shapes that shouldn't work (and yet work brilliantly).

“SpiceKick” opens the record like a smiling threat: “My music's batshit, paid for your casket”. It's immediately clear this isn't a polite piece of work — in fact “Pixxxie” is a sharp parody of the manic pixie dream girl cliché (and it's a banger that lifts the album to another level, so full of pop scented with glitch).
“Eat!Me!Out!” is one of the peaks, with sax twisting, drums pounding, and a voice that plays with desire and power in a captivating free jazz pose. “Popstar” instead reflects on the price of visibility without hiding behind metaphor, while “Salt” is an interlude of percussion and words, the moment where Merlin allows herself to savor victory, but does so aware that success is a form of solitude and, at times, of compromise.

We're in the presence of an ambitious record where the pitch-shifted narrating voice tries to hold the pieces together, but it's a superfluous device — the songs don't need explaining, and when the album trusts its own instinct, it's stronger than ever.
“Power House” talks about power as something built every day, negotiated, lost and found again. Merlin isn't trying to be a model of perfection. She's trying to be real, and she's a real force of nature.

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28/09/2026