MILK POOL, the new record from Melbourne’s Merpire, makes you feel like you’re watching a friend perform from a barstool in the corner of a café with an intimate, heart-achingly honest batch of songs about modern loneliness in all its overlapping forms, and it hits harder than it first lets on. Opener Leaving With You sets the tone as a shimmering alt-pop track that evokes the mid-90s golden age of singer-songwriters like Liz Phair, and the whole album is nostalgic and emotional, like a 90s mixtape spliced through the lens of post-pandemic confusion.

Merpire’s melodies are deceptively clever. On Premonition, she holds the word hug and drifts down and back up the scale like a butterfly in a small but spellbinding moment of fluttering beauty. This kind of attention to phrasing and emotional nuance is everywhere on MILK POOL, with remarkable depth behind these warm, friendly textures. It feels groovy, relatable, and inviting from the jump but by the end, it’s taken you somewhere much darker than you expected. Not in a bleak way, but in the way that life actually is when friendships drift, relationships burn out, and people start Googling questions they used to ask face-to-face. On the penultimate track Internet, a simple piano ballad opens with the crushingly relatable line “Internet, how do you know if somebody likes you?” sung like a quiet cry into the void, before blossoming into vocal layers, ambient warmth, and glowing beauty. The album closes with You Are Loved, an under-two-minute lo-fi lullaby sung from the far end of the room as if she’s half-convinced but still hoping. MILK POOL is a smart and painfully current record with something to say, blending grungy guitars, singer-songwriter warmth, and emotionally inventive production. On one song you’re hearing delicate finger-picked guitar, on another a lush choir of layered vocals or unexpected drum textures all in service of mood and evocative texture, and by the time the record ends, you feel like you just want to cry and give her a hug.