The Oregon coast during king tides isn’t a calm place to film anything. Water moves where it wants, the light does what it does, and the whole thing ends up looking less like a set and more like a place where things actually happen. That’s the video for “The Mountain Lion,” the new single from Portland trio Merwulf — and if the setting feels a little ominous, that’s the point.
“The Mountain Lion” is the lead single from their upcoming album “In the Golden Age,” out on Moodkiller Records out of Olympia.
The track sits with grief and what bassist Merri describes as “the pull of disappearance,” and doesn’t offer a way out of either. The tension builds across the song without resolving — intentionally. “We wanted it to keep building without offering a clean way out,” says Larry, the band’s drummer.
“In the Golden Age” was written over a year and a half and recorded by the band themselves, in their own space. Larry took on the engineering and mixing, working through it with outside feedback on technique but keeping the whole process in-house. The result pushed the record toward something stripped down and blown out — closer, as they put it, to the Portland punk scene that’s been in their corner since the beginning. “We love punk bands, even if we don’t exactly fit that genre,” Merri says.
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The title comes from a line in “Gulf of America,” one of the album’s songs: Don’t you want to go? / To the Golden Age of America / You don’t have to think / He’s thought of everything / In the Golden Age of America.
It’s a pattern for Merwulf — their first album also takes its title from a song lyric — but the meaning behind this one branched out further.
For Merri, it’s a direct and sarcastic reaction to the current political climate: the president claiming a golden age while war, inflation, reproductive rights, and protections for POC and LGBTQ2IA+ communities are being stripped back. It’s also a nod to age itself.
The band was away from playing music for years before coming back. “We joke a lot about being old,” she says. “There’s sarcasm, but it’s also positive — we have so much gratitude for getting to play music, for people wanting to play with us.”
“It ended up feeling a little off on purpose,” Larry adds. “Like calling something a golden age while everything underneath it feels uncertain, or realizing too late that it never really was.”
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The record carries that instability throughout, but heavier themes sit alongside humor and irony — not as relief, but as part of the same reality. Half the songs, Larry notes, were inspired by inside jokes.
Merri, the youngest in her family, cites the laugh as its own motivator. “I love nothing more than the positive reinforcement of a laugh,” she says. One of the tracks is literally called “I want the laugh.” It’s not escapism — it’s the band’s way of blundering through what she describes as “the distraught reality of environmental crisis, personal loss, and political horror.”
Sonically, this is a different band than the one that made their first album. Early practice recordings have them playing slower, less sure of themselves — Merri was still learning the bass when they started, playing it as the lead instrument. By the time they were building this record, they knew exactly what they wanted: growly bass, mostly unaffected vocals, and keys that pierce through the mix rather than hover above it. “The way it sounds is on purpose,” she says.
Their previous single “Snowflake,” a multi-part track moving through distinct tonal shifts, has been picking up traction on KEXP.
The band also spoke at length about the record in a recent interview with Revolt Into Sound — starting around the 34-minute mark here.
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