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Photo by Bailey Vigliaturo

Rising indie star mer marcum hit the ground running in 2026. One New Year’s Day, she announced her first single of the year, “Body.” Since then she has released three more singles, played at SXSW, and announced her debut EP, You Never Did Anything Wrong, which is now out. marcum told us all about her debut EP, collaboration, and her perfect day in Monterey, California. 

OnesToWatch: Debut EP! How are you feeling?

mer marcum: I’m healthily scared and also unrealistically excited. It’s a lot of emotions. It’s nice to do the first one because that’s the Band-Aid you rip off but there’s definitely a pressure attaching the word debut to something. It always adds this element of pressure.

For sure, but I agree that in many situations, taking that first step, ripping off the Band-Aid is huge. 

Yeah! And I’m really excited because a big thing I’m working on is being proud of myself and I’m really proud of this and I really like listening to it and that’s the main thing that matters. 

I love that! I feel like that’s something that comes with age, being able to take a step back and recognize that you did something that’s a big deal and taking the time to celebrate it. 

I was so into downplaying my successes, and also I feel like I suffered from that indie irony disease where everything had to have a tinge of irony to it. Recently I’ve been like “Wait, being earnest and sincere is so much cooler than being flippant and aloof and ironic.”

There’s nothing better than hearing someone be passionate about something.

And when they like what they like without embarrassment and they say it with their chest.

That’s so hard to do when you’re like 16 but then you come back to it and it’s still great.

Yeah, you do return to your roots in a way. 

What was it like to put together a body of work as opposed to a single?

Yeah, I did the single thing for a while. With the singles you get to focus on building one world but with the body of work it was fun to conceptualize the project. I’m a creative director outside of being a musician and I find such joy in getting to put together the creative world. The themes, and the colors and the symbols, and the videos, and the visuals. This is like my bread and butter putting together a body of work and telling a story and paying attention to all the easter eggs. I had the best time ever.

The EP takes listeners on a journey through struggle to forgiveness and it sounds like you had fun putting together the tracklist. 

Fun would maybe be a confusing way to describe it because it definitely is a lot about catharsis and introspection, but I feel like it’s a huge sigh of relief. It definitely was a writing process of being like “I need to process these things.” And not in a self indulgent way but in a way that really helped me, and I’ve never had an original thought so I know other people feel this way for sure. It’s the cool task of being an artist to name feelings and experiences and provide brevity for somebody.

Do you have any specific sources of inspiration for the sound we hear on the EP?

Totally! I had a lot of fun working with different friends who are producers, I’m a producer myself. Getting in the room with different people and their sensibilities informed a lot of things. I was listening to a lot of Broadcast, a lot of Duster, Horse Jumper of Love, Arthur Russell, Karen Dalton. Either for certain structural things, or production moments, or lyrical things. I think older artists really mastered the long body of work thing and we’ve strayed from that a little bit, in terms of making a hit, which is don’t have an intro, get to the hook immediately, don’t make the song long. It was fun to not be as influenced by the industry and more influenced by previous artists.

I’ve been really into albums recently which sounds kind of silly. I love a playlist but recently I’ve been into albums. 

I feel the same way. I was just in San Francisco visiting my grandma and her car is from 1998. I was rinsing through her CD collection and I was fully listening through albums, top to bottom, and then just popping in the next CD and I was like “Damn, we need this!”

I love that! I want to ask you a couple things about “stay away” specifically. You’ve mentioned that it is your favorite song you’ve ever made. What is it about this song that makes it stand out to you?

It’s kind of the blueprint. I made it so long ago, I made it before I made anything else on this EP. I remember when I was making it, even I was like “Damn, what is this genre?” It played on this radio station in the UK and they described it as folk with an industrial skew, and then they said it’s like if Wall-e went to the farm, and I was like “Fuck yeah!” I’ve actually been thinking about this so much, I’m so happy we’re talking about this, the scene of musicians I live with, contemporaries here in Brooklyn specifically, there’s this really cool fusing of genres that’s sort of folk rooted. You have Hudson Freeman who’s saying he’s doing the lo-fi folk thing or folk rock leaning artists or true traditional singer songwriter folk. It’s a cool time to be coming up in that scene right now. It reminds me of what it was probably like to be Bob Dylan here. New York definitely has the scene of indie rock bands and electronic music, there’s a lot of different musical scenes here but specifically the folk one is one I was like “I can’t believe I’m a part of this,” because I don’t necessarily always feel like a folk artist. “stay away!” for me as a producer it scratches an itch, I think it’s really unique. We took a lot of traditional folk instruments, banjo, pedal steel, upright bass, all these traditional folk instruments and then processed them to sound like something they’re not and that was really fun for me. 

Do you have a favorite lyric from that song? Favorite lyric from the EP overall?

I kind of joke about this, that “stay away!” is lyrically not my best. You know that interview of Phoebe Bridgers where she talks about “Waiting Room” that people love so much and she’s embarrassed about what she said?

Yes! Which is crazy because I love that song.

I love that song! Yearning girls love that song! But I have joked that “stay away!” is a little bit like that for me. It’s the only song I’ve ever written that was about a person romantically. I cringe sometimes when I hear the lyrics because it’s all me being like “You didn’t like me back.” So maybe I don’t have a favorite lyrics from that. From the project overall, I’m really proud of the last song, the title track,“You Never Did Anything Wrong.” It’s kind of an interesting song, it’s non-traditional structure wise, but the very end of it is a refrain where I say “You never did anything wrong / You were just a kid / You never did anything wrong / And you never did.” That was my final sigh of relief, and forgiveness for myself. When I wrote that, and recorded that even I could barely get through a take without tearing up, it just meant a lot to have my adult self say that to my past self.

I love that. You mentioned that “stay away!” was written a while ago. What made you choose to put it on the EP even though it’s an older song?

I meant to say this earlier and then I completely started talking about everything else. Because it was the oldest, and I said it became the blueprint, it was like my north star song for this EP in terms of sound. When I started making the EP, all the other singles I released up until “Body,” which was the first single from the project, those were all kind of experiments with different sounds, different genres, different whatevers, but the whole time in the background I was making this EP inspired by sounds on “stay away!” I was also feeling very precious about it, it wasn’t just a single, it was part of my first body of work.

I love hearing you say “north star song.” I interviewed Gatlin and she used that same turn of phrase and it really stuck out to me so I love hearing another artist say that.

I think that’s an artist's word, we love to say that. There’s certain words that I associate with the indie artist community and I do think that “north star” is one of them. 

There’s a collaboration with Jia on this EP. How did that come about?

My friend Max sent me their album late 2024 and then I couldn’t listen to anything else. My manager, Bailey, she was like “You should do a session with my friend Jake” and I was like “Sure, okay” and then she told me he was in this band called Jia and I said “Pause!” He’s her neighbor, they’re friends, and it was truly one of the craziest things ever. We did the session and then I was so nervous to ask Jia to feature because they’re famous to me. It got to the moment where I was going to ask them to feature and there was a frog in my throat and I couldn’t say it. Eventually Bailey had to ask them for me. They said yes and I was completely elated

Any other dream collaborations?

I would love to make a song with Dijon. That’s a huge goal. If he could produce a song for me I think I could retire. Or a feature with Hovvdy.

You mentioned that you’re also a producer. Do you produce your own stuff, stuff for other people?

I do mostly my own stuff. I try on every project I do to have one song I do completely myself. Knowing how to produce is really valuable, I love producing. 

You have a song called “Holiday, 2008” do you have a favorite vacation destination?

I love to go to Monterey, California. I’ve been going there since I was a kid, it’s not far from my grandma's house and I think it is my inspiration place. The same way Ernest Hemingway has, wherever Ernest Hemingway has, I have Monterey, California. In my mind that’s my happy place.

What’s your perfect day in Monterey?

Wake up. Coffee on the beach. I would probably journal and write, do some arts and crafts. I would probably spend all day on the beach, collect shells. I’m convinced that in a past life I was a mermaid. I was on the beach recently and I made this necklace and I was thinking that my role in my past life in my mermaid community was to make the jewelry and sea shell bras for everyone. I’ve been thinking a lot about if I wasn’t a musician I would try to be a lower East Side designer who makes real shell bras. How fun would that be? That’s my perfect day. I would forage for seashells. 

Who are your OnesToWatch? Who are you listening to that we need to be listening to?

For sure Jia. They’re not small but Horse Jumper of Love should have everything. There’s a shoegaze band from Texas called Teethe. My roommate Chloe Southern. Mama, another New York band. They’re getting their flowers but I think they deserve the whole bouquet. 

Listen to You Never Did Anything Wrong below: