Magi Merlin

There's a special kind of kindred spirit that Magi Merlin makes music for; her fellow obsessives. Screw the soft launch. Magi (pronounced Mahd-j-eye) sings directly to the listener, face pressed up against the other side of the screen's glass. Through her propulsive, avant-garde form of Pop and "broken” R&B, she explores life's deep existential truths, tearing through imagination and genre like outfits ripped off a garment rack. Whether that be a Galliano tulle skirt for a quick studio session, lace wrist cuffs on a first date, or jungle-inspired splintered kick drums giving way to futuristic synth lines.

Over the last years, she has written and co-composed largely alongside Funkywhat, a collaborator with whom she has built a shared musical language, Magi’s alternative forms of Pop and R&B are about as high-definition as one can imagine, without sacrificing sensuousness and emotion. Her 2022 EP Gone Girl is music that feels alive, animated by a voice that blends unruly maximalism and earned wisdom. It sent her on tour with Noga Erez and on an electric performance in Mexico City in support of Omar Apollo. A surprise EP in 2025, A Weird Little Dog, brought a deepened emphasis to her experimental style and gave rise to “Broken R&B”, a genre she named and owns entirely, less a marketing category than an honest account of how she works, her art direction and visual world as idiosyncratic and charged as the music itself. Soon after, 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 music, she made her acting debut in 2026 with Chandler Levack's Mile End Kicks, alongside Barbie Ferreira, Devon Bostick and Juliette Gariépy, which screened at TIFF and SXSW.

Born in Montreal to parents who, though not working artists, nurtured every creative instinct she brought home. Her mother gave her the freedom of expressive movement through dance, while her father, who would write poems of his own in his youth, gave her storytelling. As she grew she gathered skills the way someone acquires a mother tongue, developing a curiosity towards what makes the greater whole and spending countless hours researching painters and visual artists, making dozens of moodboards for every idea she's ever had, and even turning that curiosity towards production so that when it came to translating her vision she already had the vocabulary for it.

It was Audre Lorde––self-described as Black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, and poet––who said in a 1982 interview, "Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge. They are chaotic, sometimes painful, sometimes contradictory, but they come from deep within us." POWER HOUSE, Magi's debut album, is exactly that, a recognition that each person, like the songs themselves, contains multitudes. An invitation to embrace every aspect of what makes us human, whether that be ego or compassion, to trust what is most essentially ours and to build outward from it. The idea that we are all so many different things and that they can all live in harmony at the same time.

"I own this place," she announces on the opening track 'Welcome Home'. The phrase unravels almost immediately, a statement dissolving into a question and back again. 'SpiceKick' arrives second, announcing itself without fear, loud and unassailable, examining how conceit often is a façade for fear of inadequacy, and how that can curdle into self-loathing if left unchecked. The accompanying video directed by sterling team of kindred creatives, Félicie Diaz and Noshirt, is corporeal and choreography-forward, as relentless and punk as the track itself. 'EAT!ME!OUT!' follows as a reckoning with something larger than the self, cataloguing the embedded hypocrisies of being a woman, the misogyny stitched into culture, work and friendship. Magi's singing is tactile, arranged in such a way that it comes flying at the listener from every direction.

In burying the tender and pacifying ode to self-kindness of "So Smart" under a blanket of static instrumentation, in applying a different vocal style to each verse of "Thank You!!!," in refusing to condense the long struggle of finding yourself into a catchy pop chorus, Magi affects an irresistibly magnetic anti-charm throughout her debut. The album's middle stretch with 'WHIP' reframes the running thread of tension, cataloguing her hunger for external change while acknowledging she has no jurisdiction beyond herself.

As we near the end of POWER HOUSE, 'Workout' confronts the absurdity of beauty standards with the same unflinching eye. Magi, aware of the machinery she's caught in and still subject to, leads by example, stomping her knee-high laced boots, one in front of the other, and meeting herself in the present. Closing track 'WTVR' returns to the acknowledgement that however expansive the album's themes might be, growth begins small.

Writing from trust, Magi leans into instinct rather than mapping out an 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. As she grew into her own, music became a form of relief from her own tendency towards overanalysis, from what she calls being the ‘queen of psychoanalysing everything’, a curiosity that functions as knowledge but can just as easily become a trap. With music she steps outside that loop, letting sound and thought move through her rather than wrestling it into structured forms.

Magi never really ends a song, or even a thought for that matter; there is always more to tell, another twist in life's plot, more that could be understood, evolved or deepened, and every record is an act of love in that sense, nurtured and cared for before being shared with the world. It is not only rare but almost incomprehensible to find a body of music that genuinely matches the complexity of who you are, but Magi's work leans on exactly that possibility, pursuing the deep ties between expansive love and internal growth, dwelling in both the pain and the promise of our ability to change.