Merk - Infinite Youth (2021)

On his new album Infinite Youth, New Zealand artist Merk examines the blurry line between adolescence and adulthood, and all the clarity and mess that accompanies that blurring. This is a record that thrives on a certain simplicity of rhythm, melody, and lyric, and is compelled by contrast: pop songs influenced by art music, an album about adulthood that reflects heavily on what it is to be young, and a sonic world that is both expansive and deeply intimate.

This feeling, of a simplicity that opens up into a great depth, is refracted through every aspect of Infinite Youth: sonically, it was essential that this album leave behind the guitars that Perkins had strummed incessantly while touring the world as a member of Tom Lark and Fazerdaze, in favour of a palette that captures time and space in its intimacy and immensity. Merk credits producer and key collaborator Johan Carøe with opening up Infinite Youth’s space: “He was so good at seeing where I was hiding”. The album’s approach to balance and contour was inspired as much by the American minimalists and those who followed them (Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Arthur Russell), as it was by pop songs that transcend the basic, disregard the complex, and zero in on the simple: Infinite Youth seeks to find where ABBA, The Beach Boys, The Carpenters, the Japanese City Pop of the late 70s and 80s, and those American minimalists might meet.

An album that will capture you on first listen and then reward your every repetition, Infinite Youth reintroduces Merk and invites you, warmly, into his orbit.