Some debut albums take three weeks to make. Few take thirty years to be ready. That is the creative gap Garret Murko spans on Seriously, his first solo release. The lyrics themselves traverse decades—meticulously penned in notebooks, set aside, occasionally revisited, and long left unrecorded. The catalyst that finally bridged this chasm was not a traditional label or studio producer, but an AI music tool called Suno, which empowered Murko to transform his legacy of written pages into polished, finished tracks with remarkable speed.
The result is an album that feels less like a sprint and more like an accumulation of life experience. Murko’s delivery is characterized by a rapid, syllable-heavy flow that evokes the technical prowess of Eminem and Yelawolf. Yet, his narrative instincts are forged in a different crucible: years of dedicated work in horror and science fiction literature. This includes a film trilogy he has quietly cultivated for fifteen years, centered on a protagonist who shares his own name. On the track “Rottison Duk (the warning),” Murko writes from the perspective of an alien species contemplating intervention in human affairs, a cryptic piece of a sprawling, immersive universe he is still building.
Beneath the technical dexterity and sci-fi world-building, the album explores the persistent, often uncomfortable questions of faith. Murko does not subscribe to a formal religion, nor does he identify as an atheist. Instead, he treats his songs as a form of prayer, directed toward a divine presence he remains unsure is listening. This tension—the friction between skepticism and belief, and the blurred lines between the artist and his fictional creations—elevates Seriously beyond a standard debut. It serves as the opening chapter of an expansive narrative, with a second album already completed and a third currently in progress.
