Magi Merlin’s “WHIP” Is the Sound of Broken R&B Cracking the Whip on Itself

A bass-heavy deep cut on POWER HOUSE, “WHIP” is where Magi Merlin’s genre-splicing method turns fully feral.

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• A Deep Cut That Doesn’t Play It Safe
• Where WHIP Sits on POWER HOUSE
• Broken R&B, Defined by Doing
• Touring Behind the Record

Magi Merlin buried one of her most confrontational tracks six songs deep into her debut album. “WHIP” doesn’t come with a music video or a pre-release radio push. It sits mid-sequence on POWER HOUSE, the Montreal artist’s first full-length, released July 10 via Bonsound.

French outlet Qobuz singled out “WHIP” alongside “EAT!ME!OUT!” for its bass weight and unapologetic swagger, describing the pair as a showcase of the record’s willingness to close the distance between jazz phrasing and hip-hop attitude. That’s the recurring trick across POWER HOUSE: Merlin and longtime co-producer Funkywhat build tracks that refuse to sit still inside one genre, and “WHIP” is one of the clearest examples of the pair working at their most unfiltered.

This album describes Merlin’s voice as silver-toned and floated over production that’s simultaneous as fluid is to explosive, pairing raw desire with futuristic textures. That description lands squarely on the tracks clustered around “WHIP,” where the album’s bass-forward, club-adjacent instincts are given room to run before the record pivots into its more interior second half.

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POWER HOUSE runs twelve tracks and just over 35 minutes, opening with the minute-long intro “Welcome Home” before “SpiceKick” and “EAT!ME!OUT!” kick the tempo up. “WHIP” follows “Thank You!!!” as track six, right before the record dips into the moodier, more atmospheric run of “Crawl” and “Salt.” It functions as a hinge point: the loudest, most physical part of the tracklist giving way to Merlin’s shh, more social exposed material.

Exclaim! framed the whole record as an argument that a person contains multiple, sometimes contradictory selves, pointing to a late-album lyric where Merlin sings about being all things at once as something close to a thesis statement. “WHIP,” sequenced where it is, reads like one of those selves getting its turn.

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Merlin calls her sound “broken R&B,” a term she coined less as a marketing label than an honest account of her process: distorted production, vocals that resist a fixed form, and a fusion of ’90s house, indie pop, hip-hop, and jazz that she and Funkywhat piece together without smoothing over the seams. She’s said the term is meant to capture how she breaks things down in the studio and rebuilds them into something new.

 

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That method traces back through her catalog, from the 2021 debut EP Drug Music through the Exclaim! Best Albums-listed Gone Girl and 2025’s more experimental A Weird Little Dog. POWER HOUSE is her first attempt at pulling all of those instincts into a single, cohesive statement, and Montreal Rocks described the record as arriving mid-stride, already changing its mind, resisting the neat framing that usually comes with a debut.

tour

Merlin is on the road through the fall in support of POWER HOUSE, with stops including Dour Festival in Belgium, Flow Festival in Luxembourg, and a run of European and North American dates that lead into headline shows in Montreal and Toronto and a Wednesday-lineup slot at Rock en Seine alongside Sombr and Tyler, The Creator. A Montreal Rocks review of the album singled out a scheduled September 17 date at Foufounes Électriques as the kind of show likely to feel less like a routine tour stop and more like an initiation into Merlin’s world.

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“WHIP” tempos for getting pulled into the live set as a dedicated moment or stays a deep-cut mood-setter, it’s one of the tracks doing the most to justify Merlin’s genre label. It’s broken R&B in the most literal sense: parts that shouldn’t fit together, forced into the same three minutes, and made to work.