Long before she was opening for acts like Ty Dolla $ign or taking the stage at Osheaga, Merlin was a kid growing up in Saint-Lazare, a sleepy off-island suburb. She says it felt like a “three billion-hour” commute to downtown. She would spend her teen years with a cheek pressed against the glass, dreaming up song ideas on the EXO train crawling towards the city centre.

The first song she ever “wrote” wasn’t actually hers at all. It was an Alvin and the Chipmunks cover she became hyperfixated on at age six, trying to pass it off as her own when she sang it to her dad.

“He was like, sure sweetie,” Merlin laughs.

For whatever reason, that obsession with the squeaky track clicked in her head, and little Magi started writing songs.

“It wasn’t a music-centric household, so I think it actually gave me a blank slate to discover what I truly liked,” she says.

Then began a self-education in the basics of rock and indie through the World Wide Web and Tumblr. She found herself an “indie darling queen” almost by default in the age of Arctic Monkeys and Santigold. While she liked it well enough, it didn’t feel like her own sound. It was through stumbling upon a guy named “Funky” that she was able to find her groove.

In her late teens and early twenties, Merlin knew she had to work with a producer, but nothing quite clicked—until she met funkywhat. They lived on the same street, which felt like a sign. Other producers couldn’t understand what she wanted, or were more interested in flexing their industry connections. Funky approached collaboration with genuine curiosity and a “yes, and” philosophy that can still be heard in her music today. He’s still part of her sound, and still in the same apartment, 10 years later.

“It’s comforting to have someone with the perspective on me from the very beginning,” says Merlin. “Other people may be coming in now and seeing me as a person who is very self-assured, whereas I was not that at all.”

Over the next few years, the two of them started piecing together a sound they coined “broken R&B.” They didn’t mean for it to sound negative, but more regenerative—elbowing out the walls of a genre to make space for it to jut outwards in new directions.

“It’s like, break it, put it back together, whatever you want it to be,” says Merlin. “Arrange it your own way. Mosaic stuff.”

Even lyrically, Merlin works in fragments—stitching together evocative phrases and little quips, but seldom a cohesive narrative. While she’d like to try it one day, her upcoming album bursts with her instinctual style of hopping from one sound, one idea to the next.

“Maybe it’s a bit of ADHD brain, but the way I write is freestyle. It’s whatever comes through, like an antenna,” says Merlin. “Sometimes I only discover what I was saying afterwards.”

She works from impulses, intuition and, often, dreams. In fact, the name “Magi” came to her grandfather in a dream before she was born. The dream world feeds into her creative process often.

At one point on POWER HOUSE, a strange character called the “Freak Master” starts monologuing. I had to ask about it. She says it came from a lucid dream in which she was talking to some omnipresent, cheeky being who kind of freaked her out.

“I do think it was my higher self—the all-knower, you know?” she says. “I feel like the Freak Master is that voice.”

There was almost another interlude on the record: a laugh track. It came from the summer Merlin became obsessed with comedy—going to comedy shows, hyperfixating on specials. She would wake up from dreams and scribble down jokes. It was a bit of a phase that ended up passing through, but that playful note can still be felt on the album.