Magi Merlin’s *POWER HOUSE* Builds Steampunk R&B Around Human Contradiction

Montreal singer, songwriter, and producer Magi Merlin has been building a catalog that pulls sleek R&B into stranger, more industrial corners. Her new album POWER HOUSE, out last week, sharpens that impulse across twelve tracks co-written with collaborator Funkywhat. It’s a record of steampunk textures and trip-hop looseness, held together by a voice that stays cool even as the production bubbles and erupts beneath it.

Early glimpses like “So Smart” suggested a calming turn, but the full project is more restless. “Crawl” slinks forward on a line about sin and focus, while “Pixxxie” pushes desire into a conflicted space where reverence and self-awareness scrape against each other. “Salt” goes further, dissolving into a glitched vocal collage that feels less like a song than a new organism testing its limbs.

What saves POWER HOUSE from becoming purely atmospheric is a clear emotional backbone. In a note accompanying the release, Merlin framed the album as a space for embracing contradiction—the idea that being flawed and sometimes awful doesn’t cancel out the capacity for goodness or strength. Her words are unpolished and direct, but they cut against the polished surface of the music in a deliberate way, reminding you that the sleekness is earned, not assumed.