That this is Magi Merlin's debut album feels like a technicality. For those of us that have been following her journey, we've witnessed the chameleonic Montreal-based artist take on new forms numerous times since the 2021 release of her debut EP, Drug Music, and its smoke-enshrouded narcotic alt-R&B.Even the very next year, she made a strong re-introductory statement with the glossy hip-hop grooves of the funk-indebted Gone Girl, making Exclaim!'s Best Albums of 2022 list despite another technicality: it was a seven-track EP. Then, 2025's follow-up, A Weird Little Dog, saw Merlin revelling in the process of becoming, as she stretched her genre-blurring explorations to new experimental expanses.She arrives at her long-awaited debut LP up to her ears in those limitless possibilities, harnessing a pop sensibility and a willingness to go deeper into herself than ever before. Where Gone Girl embraced an externalized brute-force strength, POWER HOUSE invites itself into the rooms — compartmentalized parts of the musician's internal architecture — that coexist with her bold and brash.But Merlin's never been that one-dimensional pop girl whose confidence feels painted-on and hollow. Like all of us, she may occasionally feel the nagging tug at her psychic sleeve to fit neatly into a box, but she's always been a flawed, complex main character, with each entry in her œuvre reading as a rejection of some prevailing norm — but perhaps none more so than POWER HOUSE.Whether it's confronting what the responsibilities of making art in the public eye ("POPSTAR") or the male gaze's objectification of women as plot devices ("pixxxie"), Merlin remains steadfast in her dedication to having her fun, frayed-edged music be a vehicle to say something interesting. The lucid social commentary, the wit, the absolute joie-de-vivre — even when roiling in "Salt"-y feelings — that come through in everything she and longtime co-conspirator funkywhat dream up in their mind-meld is undeniable.Proper opener (following the 61-second "Welcome Home" intro) "SpiceKick" epitomizes this burst of spunky energy, getting POWER HOUSE going by blasting the club door off its hinges as Merlin spits, "My music's batshit / Paid for your casket," atop a chrome catwalk stomp of drum machine and distorted bass. The artist herself refers to her music as "broken R&B," hoping the term conveys the way she brings disparate pieces and threads of influence together. Multiple elements could arguably serve as the glue: the nostalgic futurism of funkywhat's beats, Merlin's velvet-to-venom delivery; even her personality alone.It's a through-line across her discography, and about as close as we get to cohesion. Something in the extended sax jam of "EAT!ME!OUT!" sounds like a sped-up version of the slurried "Drug Music" riff or the Hiatus Kaiyote worship of Merlin's past collaborations with Busty and the Bass, while the dubby vocal vamping that follows the beat switch in the middle of "Thank You!!!" — before a fever pitch of shrill spoken-word delivery ends with a maniacal witch cackle — feels somehow indebted to Disturbed's "Down with the Sickness." as she puts it on the latter POWER HOUSE cut, "I am all things all the time."That lyric just about sums up the record's thesis in and of itself: beneath the powerful exterior of the self-assured ingenue is someone who can get distracted by her own façade sometimes — and lost in the maze of her own inner sanctum. In the Internal Family Systems therapeutic approach, it's believed that we contain multiple selves. Solving internal conflicts between these different parts helps us work toward integrating the fragments into a whole, if such a thing exists.It's clear that POWER HOUSE is trying to see this through, with a pitch-shifted narratorial voice — a stand-in for one of Merlin's antagonistic parts — fading in and out throughout the record, attempting to tie these songs together conceptually. This is wholly unnecessary, and can take the listener out of the moment. Concept albums are great, but there's no requirement for a body of work to make sense in that way.The narrator, however, does serve to underscore a key point at the end of "EAT!ME!OUT!": "I heard such power can scare some folk. But of course, you are not some folk."That she is not. Merlin's most fully-realized artistic statement of intent to date, POWER HOUSE embraces the messiness of having — and being — an excess of (sometimes contradictory) ideas. Steering ever-more adeptly between the signposts of wherever her ADHD brain's beautifully vast referential lexicon lands, she crushes her truth into diamonds ("So Smart") — which get their brilliance from dozens of facets.
Wavelength
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