Mermaidens are a rock band from Wellington, New Zealand. Following up their previous EP, O (which we featured on our Favourite Free Music of 2014 list), the band are back with a full length album, Undergrowth.
The songs here are heavy and brooding, Mermaidens dabbling in the darker edges of psychedelica to produce tracks which twitch and throb with something almost malevolent in nature. ‘Under the Mountain II’ is a perfect example, loud and massive, rumbling on with the momentum of a dark prophecy. There’s a shamanistic quality to the song too, the lyrics packed with loaded imagery from the natural world, esoteric symbols from which some great energy can be unlocked or governed.
“I don’t want to die in the shade
I’m a corpse on the beach
I’m a corpse on the beach
I’m a thing,
send me out to sea”
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Other highlights include the title track, a song sparser in nature for all of two minutes before the drums accelerate into a fine groove, ‘Cold Skin’, with its bewitchingly off-kilter instrumentation and reptilian persona (“Let me fold around you / Taste your skin”), and the sleek ‘Wander’, a song which glides forward with grace and old world oddness. The record closes with ‘Splinter’, a song reminiscent of the intuitive mysticism of Todd Umhoefer’s Old Earth, where something both ominous and alluring bubbles under the surface, daring you to submit to its charm.
You can buy Undergrowth now from the Mermaidens Bandcamp page.