By Arielle Lana LeJarde
The expertise of coming of age is usually captured in artwork and common tradition. Tales of teenybopper heartbreak, unpredictable change, and discovering your self try to mine our collective pangs of adolescence or emotions of nostalgia. However in 21-year-old Mercury‘s newest venture, Tabula Rasa, the Atlanta-based rapper doesn’t must attempt. The album strikes on a visceral stage, every tune expressing the elastic feelings of rising up.
Antithetical to its Latin translation of “clean slate,” Tabula Rasa isn’t meant to function a brand new starting for Mercury. On the high of 2021, “Slob on My Kat,” Mercury’s raunchy and booty-bouncing response to Tear da Membership Up Thugs and Three 6 Mafia’s “Slob on My Knob,” was named Pitchfork’s must-hear rap tune of the day. Eight months later, she launched her trap-centric debut album MERCTAPE. After solely making music for 2 years, a number of tracks on the document noticed over 100,000 Spotify streams on a tune, beginning with “Cacti.”
However these achievements haven’t impeded Mercury’s effortlessly down-to-earth aura. She takes her moniker from Kodansha Comics’s magical lady Sailor Mercury, a particularly shy junior-high pupil who turns into a guardian of the photo voltaic system after forming a basis with the remainder of the Sailor Scouts. Her personal story adopted an analogous trajectory: In 2018, a yr earlier than she began rapping, she found a house within the skateboarding neighborhood. “I stored very a lot to myself,” Mercury says. “As I began making music and began skateboarding, I began blossoming extra, popping out of my shell, and being extra assured.” Her help system continues to be holding sturdy; two of her buddies sit behind her throughout our Zoom dialog, sporadically chiming in with laughter.
As Mercury hones her abilities within the male-dominated skate and rap video games, she handles the challenges of gatekeeping and competitiveness with verve, utilizing any hurdle as gasoline for achievement. “Being a girl, it’s important to do extra simply to show your self,” she says. “When you let what they are saying get to you, you are not gonna do nothing. And it simply pushes me to go tougher as a result of I simply need to be higher than the boys.” What individuates Mercury isn’t her slick swagger topped with erratic hair shade modifications, her tongue-in-cheek wit and uncooked Twitter grit, and even her poignant lyrics atop unpredictable manufacturing types, it’s the no-bullshit perspective that manifests in the whole lot she does.
With Tabula Rasa, she hopes to encourage others to have the identical outlook. Whether or not she’s spitting info about unstable romantic relationships in “Operating Spherical,” getting actual about psychological well being in “On My Thoughts,” or feeling herself in “As It Will get,” Mercury holds no prisoners and tells it like it’s. “I need others to really feel like they’ll simply do what they fucking need,” she insists. “Simply preserve doing what you are feeling is correct in your life. That is how I really feel making this. All of the songs are mainly timestamps of what I am going by way of with my life.” She provides, “I need folks to really feel progress after they take heed to this album. Simply undergo shit and preserve shifting forward-type shit.”
Whereas Mercury stays true to her Atlanta entice roots within the document, she additionally performs round with different kinds of beats. A pulsating drum sample gives a frantic but dynamic power increase to the lead single, “Operating Spherical,” which she describes as a tune “about me being fed up with being in dumb relationships and simply over it.” Impressed by “Time Is Hardcore” by the Welsh producer Excessive Distinction, the rapper’s affinity for dance music penetrates the observe. She’s listened to digital artists like Overseas Beggars, Skrillex, and Deadmau5 since she was 12 years outdated. And earlier than Merc was a rapper, she was — and nonetheless is — a DJ, so rapping over a drum-and-bass beat isn’t completely out of character.
The playful tune arrived with a music video that featured comedian book-style graphics spliced with live-action scenes, which Mercury directed and executed with videographer Salim Garcia and animator Harrison Wyrick. The clip portrays real-life {couples} preventing in juxtaposition with an over-the-top cartoon character wandering aimlessly in a colourful, monster-filled maze. “[My videos are] my concepts coming into fruition and getting extra tapped into what I really feel with my music, how I need it to be offered to the world, the way it makes me really feel, and the way it makes different folks really feel,” she explains.
Plus, Mercury isn’t any stranger to the star-making energy of a great music video. In December 2020, she starred in Rico Nasty’s rowdy “STFU” visual. Nasty personally requested the emcee to look within the video, and Merc credit the fiery girls-against-boys combat flick with turning the trade’s eye towards her. Quickly, Mercury would go on to promote out a headlining hometown present, snag that Pitchfork nod, and drop her debut venture.
When MERCTAPE got here out, she had little doubt it will do it properly. And though the keen response from followers to the March announcement of Tabula Rasa was even wilder, Mercury doesn’t give in to the strain, sustaining an earnest self-confidence as a substitute. “Each tune on there’s actually a bop to me,” she says. “This isn’t like something that I be listening to from anybody else. It’s only a venture I felt actually good making and it simply feels good even listening to it.” She retains her personal songs on heavy rotation at dwelling. “I simply play it on a regular basis, and nonetheless, I am not uninterested in it,” she says. “I really feel like as soon as that is out, that is gonna be the jumpstart of the whole lot for me as a result of I obtained some, like, actually good songs on right here. So I hope y’all suppose that, however [also] I simply know that shit.”
Salim GarciaTogether with Tabula Rasa, Mercury is now coming off her first supporting tour with MIKE and Na-Kel Smith. When talking along with her earlier than the primary date, she couldn’t maintain again her enthusiasm. “[MIKE] is so cool. He helps me,” she notes. “After I got here to New York, the gang got here out to help me for the pop-up. It’s simply good vibes. So I am simply excited and everyone makes tremendous sick-ass music. So I simply really feel prefer it’s gonna be a enjoyable time.”
With the come-up simply in reaching distance for Mercury, her magnetic persona and self-aware composure compel listeners to consider in her simply as a lot as she believes in herself. After years of rising up in areas the place she didn’t see many different women who regarded like her, Mercury is lastly making a blueprint to induce different younger folks to additionally come into their very own, on their very own phrases. Within the uplifting tune “Chit Chat,” she spits, “I’m gonna do greater than succeed / My purpose is past what I see.” And now, she brazenly manifests, “I simply need to get to the purpose the place I can survive off of this music shit. Simply residing like I need off of music shit, having enjoyable, and with the ability to deliver my buddies with me, too.”
