Marlon Williams

We spoke to New Zealand multi-hyphenate Marlon Williams about how he meshes worlds on stunning new album 'My Boy'.

it’s one art form in which there’s a multiplicity of expression, which I think is really nice and an important aspect of it.” I’m kind of blending my worlds into each other, in as non-pervasive and in as gentle a way as possible… ”And the way they translated it is, instead of describing the sunset, they’ll talk about the mighty personification of it. ”There is a lot going on there, but the overall effect is extremely simple. So there is a lot of mystery and magic between the walls.” “There’s all of Neil’s guitars sitting around, so I think there is a little bit of stolen magic – the ghosts of music that are haunting it.

On “My Boy,” the New Zealand singer-songwriter experiments with electronic flourishes in search of a lighthearted groove.

“My Boy” dissolves on the understated final track, “Promises,” with Williams singing, “Can you learn to grow?” It seems he can. “Don’t Go Back” has a drum-machine rhythm and, were the song less ribald, you might believe it was by Barry Gibb: “All the night moves coming out / Conversation you could do without / You’re bored of that / But she’s got her finger in her mouth / And you know what that’s about.” The minimalist “River Rival” is hard to parse lyrically, but it has a hypnotic sound—a call and response between Williams’s vocals and a synthesizer. In 2020, Williams collaborated with the Canadian duo Kacy & Clayton on “Plastic Bouquet,” a superb record of poignant modern folk tunes, in which Williams’s voice is elastic enough that he can inhabit more than interpret—now a cowboy, now a spurned lover, now a troubadour. Two years prior, Williams appeared at a memorial marking Christchurch’s devastating earthquake with “Po Atarau” (“Now Is the Hour”), based on an early-twentieth-century Australian standard. With its charming “doo-dee-doo”s and G-rated lyrics, you could imagine “My Boy” on the soundtrack of the queer teen soap opera “Heartstopper.” But it feels less like a gay anthem than a paean to masculinity itself, as the jokey video, which captures Williams and his chums formation-dancing in matching outfits, makes clear. “Make Way for Love” is about heartbreak—reportedly, the dissolution of Williams’s romance with another brilliant musician from New Zealand,