Swedish artist Murex shares ‘Puddle’, the final track to be unveiled from her debut album Inventio, out this Friday 25th September via Young. It premiered earlier today on Matt Wilkinson’s Apple Music 1 Show.
‘Puddle’ is where Murex begins to find the light, like a glimmer on a pool of rainwater, made sonic by the whorling clarinets of Pelle Westlin and Isak Hedtjärn. “Found myself a puddle to pour into… I’m leaking into you, there’s nothing I can do, I’m leaking into you,” she sings — a twinkling, melancholic romance.
“It’s about the desire to pour myself into another person — that feels like a very beautiful way of escaping my own existence,” says Murex. “It can feel tempting to melt into someone, but then, you don’t have to figure out your own stuff. You just pour into another person’s puddle.”
It is a moment of warmth in a record that has largely dealt in reckoning. Where debut song ‘Massacre’ channelled rage and most recent single ‘Mothers Bells’ reached for connection and forgiveness, ‘Puddle’ sits with the softer, more seductive danger of dissolving into somebody else. It’s a run – alongside ‘Flock Of Swans Fly In V’s’ and the trumpet-scored ‘Hardness Of A Silverspoon’ – that has established Murex as a truly singular new artist, and one The Guardian has already called “thrillingly innovative”.
Murex’s world continues to reveal itself in fragments. Artists making pop music today are expected to calcify as one easily consumable version of themselves, or capitulate wildly to the capricious algorithm. Murex is already an accomplished songwriter, propelling the work of women challenging those constraints their way, and with Inventio, she spreads her wings beyond that.
Deeply informed by storytelling and the spirit of Nordic folklore, Inventio unfurls as a glitching, glimmering constellation of 10 tracks, charting a journey to confront body dysmorphia, control and a fracturing sense of self — each track spinning out from the last as Murex untangles herself from that state, reaching toward creative and emotional liberation, all set to ethereal, amorphous avant-pop. The record takes its name from Bach’s Inventions, which Murex played growing up on piano, and that Baroque spirit runs throughout: trilling polyphonic textures, melodies that drive amorphously from one track into the next, her lush vocal harmonies rising above it all.
Murex is a visual artist as well as a musician, and the record is shadowed throughout by her own stark pencil drawings — vegetal creatures devouring a body, swans flocking into the shape of a crest of arms. Every visual on Inventio has been self-directed.
Listen to ‘Puddle’ here
Watch the self-directed ‘Puddle’ video below
MUREX
INVENTIO
Inventio is released 25th September
via Young Recordings
Tracklisting:
- Massacre
- Been Here Too Long
- The Spire
- Hardness of a Silverspoon
- Biased
- Puddle
- Flock Of Swans Fly In V’s
- Muzak
- 9. Mothers Bells
- Inventio
Praise for Murex
“From her thrillingly innovative debut album, the delightful vision of sprites playing hide-and-seek around a glitching harp.” – The Guardian
“An amorphous avant-pop record that taps into whimsical influences such as Björk’s Vespertine and the Nordic folk tradition” — The Observer
“There’s a magnetic force to Murex – the amorphous song structure becoming truly hypnotic.” – Clash
“There’s also something here of the intricacy and grace of contemporary experimentalists at the intersection of pop, folk and jazz like Clarissa Connelly, Circuit Des Yeux and Astrid Sonne; in this respect in particular, Inventio promises great returns” — Loud And Quiet
“A vivid piece of electronic production, channeling anger, rage and anxiety into a tightly controlled but emotionally overwhelming track.” – Rombo Magazine
“Hardness of a Silverspoon, by Swedish artist Murex, is a low-hanging cloud to the face, all gothic, choral and chilling, like Boards of Canada fronted by an anguished vampire.” – Line Noise
“What makes her sound truly singular, though, is its distinctly Scandinavian atmosphere, shaped by Nordic folklore and the Swedish landscape”- Highcloud
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