Mercury performs live in the studio
Inside the tracking room of East Iris Studio in Berry Hill, Maddie Kerr directs a whirlwind of sound. Face curtained by long waves of ginger-blond hair, she conducts her orchestra of downtuned riffs and sobering ruminations with a black Gibson SG. Bathed in hazy blue light, the band plays live on the floor, navigating the spaces between loud and quiet as they steer deftly around the contours of Kerr’s rock songs.
Kerr’s brainchild is Mercury, a Nashville band making waves in a noisy shoegaze scene producing some of the South’s coolest acts. Raised on Radiohead and Deftones, Kerr wants Mercury songs to capture what she describes as a “very big, emotional, cinematic, heavy” sound, like what listeners hear on standout 2024 EP Together We Are One, You and I, which was produced by Alex Farrar — whose credits include Wednesday, MJ Lenderman and Snail Mail, among others — at his studio in Asheville, N.C.
On Thursday, Mercury kicks off a new leg of touring with a sold-out hometown show at The Basement East. The group supports headliner Arcy Drive on a run of fall dates that includes stops in Kansas City, Chicago, Toronto, Philadelphia, New York and two nights in Washington, D.C. Also on Thursday, the band’s live-in-studio session at Nashville’s Blackbird Studios, a film of which was made by Guitar World, will hit streaming services.
“I’ve always wanted a band, since I was a kid,” Kerr says during a break between takes at East Iris, where she’s recording live videos to be released at a later date. She continues, “In kindergarten, before I even knew how to write words out loud and make the letter shapes, I was drawing pictures of me and my classmates in band formation and naming them the Meerkats and showing everyone what I was doing.”
A 24-year-old Franklin native, Kerr started Mercury during her senior year at Franklin High School. She briefly studied at Lipscomb University before diving full-time into her indie-rock dreams. During the month between her time in the classroom and going on the road, she took on odd jobs around town — the kinds of gigs whose perks included listening to classic country, folk and grunge for hours on end.
Eventually, Mercury inked a deal with Nashville label Big Loud Rock. The band began steadily releasing singles and EPs, beginning with the ultra-catchy “I Don’t Know You Like I Used To” in 2022. Last year, alongside Together We Are One, You and I, the band released an EP called Swarm the Hive Mind, a sonic wall of unsettled storytelling. This year, Mercury has released two songs so far. The fun, free-floating rocker “Justin’s Headed Out” came after “Faster,” a meditative, two-and-a-half minute take on moments when thoughts spiral beyond control.
“The setting of it is laying in bed, laying awake at night, thinking about every bad thing that maybe has happened to you,” says Kerr. “Any experience you can’t get off your mind, for some reason. Being like, ‘My mind is racing over a million different things right now.’ How it’s a useless loop. It happens to everyone.”
This fall, Mercury tours acoustic, highlighting stripped-back renditions of songs from the band’s growing catalog. Kerr has toured acoustic before, once creating “truly bluegrass renditions” of her songs. This time, however, Mercury wants to stay closer to its plugged-in sound.
“This time around, I definitely wanted it to be a little bit closer to what my music sounds like, given we’re playing to a lot of brand new audiences,” Kerr says. “We got asked to do it stripped because the person who asked us to do it saw the stripped version. I was like, ‘OK, cool. We’re gonna go through our pedal boards and amps still, and play acoustic guitars.’ That’s what we’re going to do to make it translate. It’ll still have those acoustic undertones to it. It’s really fun to do it that way.”
After releasing a few EPs and a handful of singles, Kerr says she’s working on a debut LP that should reach earbuds soon. What topics will she tackle on this collection of songs?
“It’s all the ideas that I usually touch on, stuff that I carry with me every day. That stuff’s never gonna go away. It's talking about those really hard moments and the things that you go through. Trying to get through everything, letting go and learning how to move forward with it. I’m always trying to do that.”
