merci, mercy

At 19 years of age merci, mercy has experienced her share of highs and lows. After living amid the controlled chaos of Beijing and Thailand as a young teen, merci, mercy now spends her time in Australia between Sydney and Jindabyne in the isolated Snowy Mountains… but strangely enough, the alienation that sometimes comes with living overseas occurred when merci, mercy moved back to Australia. Her unique upbringing — plus being surrounded by musical siblings — instilled in her a deep love of a diverse array of musical genres. “I never had one favorite artist or type of music,” merci, mercy explains. “I think my music reflects that too. I’ve always listened to everything, r’n’b, indie, pop, whatever.” Taking her name and doubling it (after a friend bemoaned her ‘i’ or ‘y’ indecisiveness), she put a song, “Be”, online, calling it “the scariest thing I’d ever done”. Overcoming those nerves paid off though, as highly respected label Liberation Records (Vance Joy, Temper Trap, DD Dumbo) got in touch. Next came her brutally honest and beguilingly intimate debut single, “Fucked Myself Up”, toting an icy-all-enveloping beat punctuated by line after memorable line delivered by merci, mercy in her dreamily-biting purr. It’s a song that deals with “my state of mind, about the way I coped with being in situations that I found socially scary,” explains merci, mercy. “I couldn’t be around people and fucking myself up was the way I dealt with it.”