Merkules released his album Special Occasion on November 1, 2019 through Merkules Music Inc. under exclusive licence to RBC Records and BMG. This is a catalogue album, framed as catalogue: nothing here is new, and the Merkules Special Occasion record matters because it is the moment a Surrey, British Columbia rapper who built his audience one YouTube video at a time sat down to make, in his own words, a real album.
The context is the rise that preceded it. Merkules, born Cole Stevenson on September 27, 1992 and raised in Surrey, started rhyming at fifteen under the name Merk Mikz, met Snak The Ripper at a concert, joined his tours as a hype man and became part of the Stompdown Killaz collective. His audience was built on camera: covers and remixes over beats by Eminem and Big Pun, then remixes of Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You” and Linkin Park’s “In the End” that travelled worldwide. His 2019 remix of Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” trended at number two on YouTube, and by the time the album arrived his channels had passed 150 million views. The video embedded below is the album’s first single, “All Night Long,” produced by C-Lance and directed by Stuey Kubrick.
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Merkules Special Occasion: Fifteen Tracks, One Theme
The album runs fifteen songs in 53 minutes on its Apple Music listing, and its guest list reads like a roll call of the underground he came from: Tech N9ne and Hopsin trade verses on “Bass,” Jelly Roll and Rittz join “On Top,” Uncle Murda appears on “In The Field,” and Paul Wall and DMX are among the album’s voices as well. For a self-built Canadian independent, that feature list was the statement: the American underground’s hardest touring names, on a Surrey rapper’s record, because his numbers had already done the introductions.
Merkules said the difference this time was intent. Earlier projects were built song by song as the momentum came; this one, his first under the RBC and BMG pact, was sequenced as a single work. In the album’s official bio he put it plainly:
“This one actually sounds like an album through and through. It doesn’t sound like just a bunch of records thrown together. It’s more themed.”
The title track was not even written as one. He made the song “Special Occasion” without intending it to name the album, then heard the theme in it afterwards: the record is the occasion, the proof that the kid filming remixes in Surrey had somewhere real to arrive at.
The Voice Underneath: Honesty As The Brand
What separates Merkules in Canadian hip hop is what he raps about and how directly he raps it. At sixteen he was attacked walking home at night, beaten and stabbed, and left with the facial scars he has discussed openly for years, turning the experience into his album Scars and a catalogue built on addiction, recovery and mental health long before those subjects were standard in rap marketing. Songs like “I Wish I Was Happy” and “Trust Issues,” both on this album, are that writing at full length: the confessional mode is not a side project for him, it is the main one, and it is why his audience treats his records as lifelines rather than content.
The commercial record followed the honesty. His official bio credits Special Occasion with a number twenty showing on Billboard’s rap chart rankings, a sentence that would have been unthinkable for a Stealth Bomb Records independent a few years earlier, and he said of the previous album, Cole: “With my Cole album last year, we hit Billboard and that was crazy to even say that I had anything to do with Billboard.” The afterlife kept paying out, too: “Bass,” this album’s Tech N9ne and Hopsin collaboration, was placed in the 2020 video game Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2, putting a Surrey independent’s voice inside one of the best-selling game soundtracks of its era.
Heard now, Special Occasion is the hinge record of the Merkules catalogue: the YouTube remix phenomenon on one side, the album artist on the other, fifteen tracks sequenced to prove the second could hold the first one’s audience. Released on November 1, 2019, it remains the fullest document of how far a Canadian independent can travel on a camera, a work ethic and a refusal to clean up the story.
