Merlot Embargo and the Art of the Hard Stop
Merlot Embargo and the Art of the Hard Stop
What a Forced Pandemic Hiatus Did to an LA Duo’s Indie-Pop Sound
Merlot Embargo describe themselves as a collective who use “guitars, voices, glockenspiels, fiddles, drum kits, horns, pianos, and bits of junk”. It is a maximalist inventory for a band whose most-covered single spends three and a half minutes holding almost all of it back. Sticking Around came out on 28 October 2022, and nearly four years later it is still the track people arrive at Merlot Embargo through.
Merlot Embargo runs through the playlist below, and everything we have published about them is filed on the artist profile. Sticking Around was picked up here via PopHits.Co Music Charts, the certification programme that verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news desks. Put it on before the rest of the piece.
What Merlot Embargo Left Out Of The Arrangement
The band is Scarlet Biberstein and Geoff Gross, a married pair from Los Angeles. They write at home and play across southern California with a full band. That split shapes the record. Scarlet writes and sings. Geoff went to music school, plays guitar and engineers. The song is arranged by people who record themselves, which usually means fewer parts and more space.
Sticking Around uses that space deliberately. It opens laidback, almost polite. The first impression is a clean indie-pop tune with a strong vocal on top. Then the detail arrives. Reviewing the single for The Other Side Reviews, Nicole Mendes heard the contrast the band were reaching for. Scarlet’s vocals sit with the instrumentation to make “a laidback, toe-tapping tune that is easy to listen to”, while “the indie-rock guitars, drums and interspersed synths bring an obscure grittiness to the song”.
That grittiness is the point. The lyric is about staying with someone who makes you feel diminished. A fully smooth production would have flattered it into something it is not. Instead the guitars keep a burr on them, and the synths sit low rather than gliding over the top. The band call the track a demonstration in tasteful tension and release. That reads like promotional language until you follow the dynamics, which do exactly that.
Their own reference points are useful, because they are honest about the split. The duo place themselves near Brandi Carlile and Adele for the voice. Behind that sits a band raised on the Beatles, Radiohead and the Roots. The first two explain the vocal. The second three explain why the backing does not behave like a pop record, and why the track sits oddly in this site’s indie pop coverage.
The Mix: What A Home Studio Run By An Engineer Buys You
Sticking Around was written during the 2020 and 2021 shutdown, when the band could not perform. It was their first release since 2020. Two years off the stage shows up in the recording, and not as rust. It shows up as decisions.
The vocal is the loudest thing in the mix by some margin. A band makes that choice when they trust the singer and have nothing to hide behind. The drums are dry and close rather than washed in room reverb. That home-studio signature works in the song’s favour: the track feels like people in a room. The synths are used as colour, not as pads. Nothing is doubled for the sake of size.
The Ending: A Hard Stop Instead Of A Fade
Then there is the ending, the most interesting decision on the record. Writing about the single for Lower Loveday, one reviewer noted that the song “builds throughout and comes to an abrupt halt at the end, which really encapsulates the emotions of the lyrical content”. No fade, no ritard, no final chorus repeat. It simply stops.
A fade would have let the listener down gently. A song about staying too long in something that diminishes you has no business doing that. Cutting the track dead is the clearest evidence that the production serves the writing rather than the format. It is also what a band does when nobody in the room is asking for a radio edit.
The AltPop.News curator team: “Hard stops are rare in pop because they cost you the playlist transition, and most acts will not take that hit. Merlot Embargo took it. Four years on, the ending is still the thing people describe first when they talk about this song. That suggests the trade was worth making, and it is a band trusting a structural decision over a commercial one.”
The single also marked a change of direction. The band have said it came out of dissatisfaction with their earlier sound. The move is audible: away from soft folk, toward more edge and more risk in the melody writing.
“I hope our songs not only bring people joy, but moments of self-reflection and retrospection,” said Scarlet Biberstein.
Where To Hear Merlot Embargo
Stream Sticking Around on Spotify, buy it from Bandcamp, and find the full catalogue on the band’s YouTube channel.
Follow Merlot Embargo across platforms: Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X, and the official site.
About The Author
