Mermaid Chunky - Slif Slaf Slof

“Céilí,” the opening track of Mermaid Chunky’s “Slif Slaf Slof,” breaks the dawn over a pastel-colored dreamscape. Endless rolling hills of gently swaying lavender grass begin to turn blue and pink as interlocking recorders light the way forward for vocals full of childlike excitement, explaining everything we’re about to experience. The only distinguishable English words we can make out are, “It’s so nice.” Truly, it is so nice to be greeted in this way, to lock eyes with someone unknown and recognize them instantly, as if your souls shook hands before your bodies did. She grabs your wrist and pulls you into this imaginary world, transforming you back into a child in the process. Let’s roll back our lips and expose our teeth in the most pleasant way as we run into this rainbow field together, hand in school-aged hand.

By the time we reach the stream at the bottom of the prismatic hill we’ve just descended, we’re greeted by track two, “Frogsporn,” and just like that, it’s time to slam our mouths shut. Not out of fear, but from the instinctive, slightly embarrassed silence that descends when you accidentally stumble into an amphibian orgy. The air is thick, the soundtrack breathy, and the frogs very busy. A rhythmic breathing backing track is layered on the opening line, “sex dungeons in frogsporn are the same… bringing in all the strings.” This stream is thick with frogs, full-on frogging in the mucky soup. Melodic human sounds mimic them, not in parody, but in reverence. We are not so different from frogs, or anything that breeds. The music, inspired by nature’s rhythm and strange logic, invites us to observe, to listen. We’re clothed for now, but the journey will ask us to disrobe eventually, in body or mind or both. As beautiful horns transition us out of the frog dungeon, we continue.

Track three, “Tiny Gymnast,” bounces us further down the trail, a trail straight out of “Yo Gabba Gabba,” coiled with mushroom patches and cryptid wildlife. We curve and wind our way into a fantastical library, where the vocalist begins to seduce a sexy librarian before abruptly bursting out of the building, unable to restrain her fire. This kind of absurd life can’t be contained by whispers and card catalogs. It needs room to stretch and spin and scream.

The end of track three melts into untamed digital psychedelia — horns, recorders, frog-logic again — before lifting us into track four, “Chaperone,” where suddenly, we’re inside Wembley Stadium. The lead vocalist takes on the persona of a recently divorced audiobook author who can no longer suppress her sexual vitality. She feeds off the audience like a sorceress, casting her spoken-word spells, breathy, breathless, into every pair of waiting ears. This is dance-magic at its peak, the track that turns your living room into a club floor, your headphones into ecstasy. We bear witness to an evolution of this one woman’s sexual maturity as she exits her monotonous marriage and makes love to the entire arena-sized audience through their earholes.

And just as the stadium fireworks begin to fade, we feel a familiar tug on our sleeve: our childhood guide, peeking out from behind a speaker stack, taller now and clearly going through something. She’s trying on a bra for the first time — over her shirt, for some reason — though she’ll soon decide she doesn’t need one. She hasn’t abandoned us. She’s evolving too, right alongside us, echoing the same arcs in smaller, stranger, more innocent ways. She takes our hand and leads us out of the stadium before the crowd can crush us at the narrow exits. Back on the path, we pass a medieval castle in track six and hear a brief madrigal echo off the stone walls. Then we reenter the wilderness with track seven, “Nature Girl.” Our friend is curious now, hungrier, bolder. “Even though I’m a nature girl, I don’t know what that leaf is.” Her world expands; the desire to classify and order emerges: higher education, knowledge, language. But she keeps it light. She giggles, “Laughing... hahahaha... laughing at you… I mean with you… to you.” Let us laugh before we descend into our final resting place: track eight, “Sad Nun.” This is where the journey, the life, the evolution, winds down.

“Slif Slaf Slof” tells the story of one girl’s transformation, laid across a prism of timelines: her personal growth, the evolution of the species, of all species, of nature, of the cosmos. Mermaid Chunky guides us through the chaos of becoming human, animal, and cosmic with a sense of humor, tenderness, and fearless playfulness. In seven tracks, 45 minutes, and one trip, the album doesn’t ask to be decoded so much as experienced, like a half-remembered dream that lingers in your body. In the end, it reminds us that growing up is less about leaving childhood behind and more about learning how to carry it forward. Mermaid Chunky distills the chaos of transformation into a potent medicine and drips it into your ears to remind you, with psychedelic clarity: don’t take this shit too seriously.