Ears Wide Open: Mehro

Kevin Bronson on November 15th, 2021

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The landscape of pop aspirants these days is populated by mountains of Instagram selfies that look like headshots for a high school yearbook’s Coed Pout Club. Everybody has spectacularly manicured eyebrows. Everybody has a relatable story to tell, their own. Everybody has found a way to do so with au courant production.

The singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer going by the name Mehro has slowly separated himself from the pack since releasing his first single in February 2020. The music is the work of the 22-year-old Manhattan Beach native born Sam Sturges, who has now legally changed his name to mehro, which he prefers to render all lowercase because “I like to be less spoken. I prefer my actions define what I do rather than my words,” he explained in an interview.

Indeed, the artist disdains bombast and theatrics in his concise confessionals, instead allowing lyrical heft, easy melodies, an arching tenor and a cinematic sheen to convey his inner wrangling. He rolled his first seven singles into the March mini-album, “Sky on Fire,” and this summer released a short film that married “The Same” with the title track, with stunning results.

Mehro this year has embarked on revealing his next project, “Alchemy and Dark Corners,” one song at a time. “Howling,” which is a floppy hat away from being a folk song, finds the singer in a dark corner, oozing longing, while the sunnier but equally needy “Coastline” sounds lifted from jangle-pop’s past.

Last week brought the arrival of “Green Felt,” which the artist says is “the first song I ever wrote,” adding “I was in a dark judgmental phase of my life. Writing this helped me alchemically let go of criticizing others, and it made me realize that we are one and the same. I am a hypocrite. And so are you.”

Some just take better pictures than others.

||| Watch: The video for “Green Felt”