Swedish artist Murex shares ‘Puddle’, the final track to be unveiled from her debut album Inventio, out this Friday 25th September. 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, the album 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.
Pre-order / pre-save Inventio here.
