Some artists spend years chasing a sound. Garret Murko spent thirty writing one down before he ever recorded it.
The Knoxville-based artist has released his debut solo album, Seriously, a dense, verse-driven project built almost entirely without traditional choruses — a deliberate choice that puts the weight of every track on the lyrics themselves. Murko wrote most of that material long before he had any plan to release it: decades of notebooks filled during a parallel career as a horror and science fiction writer, songs and stanzas set aside for “someday.” That someday arrived fast. After discovering the AI music platform Suno, Murko pulled the strongest, most thematically connected pieces from his archive and assembled the entire album in three weeks.
Seriously doesn’t ease into its subject matter. Across the tracklist, Garret Murko takes aim at how people treat one another, how societies govern themselves, and — more unusually for the genre — how humanity relates to God, with several songs addressing the divine directly and questioning ideas of attention, infallibility, and immortality rather than taking them for granted.
“I write to hold a mirror up to humanity,” Murko says of the project. “I ask if we’re making the right decisions as a species. I don’t exempt myself from that question.”
Two tracks, “Welcome to Earth” and “Rottison Duk (The Warning),” point toward something bigger: they’re the first musical pieces of a film trilogy Murko has been developing for fifteen years, built around a character who shares his own name — the name he now records under. Seriously is being positioned as chapter one of a wider multimedia project spanning music and film.
Murko’s musical education traces back to St. Petersburg, Florida, where he grew up alongside foster siblings his family took in — including Sherwin Petrucelli, now known in Tampa Bay hip-hop circles as DJ Winn. Petrucelli produced Murko’s earliest recordings and helped shepherd a group project that once had label interest, before the death of a member ended those plans and Murko stepped away from music for years, redirecting that energy into fiction instead.
He cites Eminem, Yelawolf, Insane Clown Posse, Tupac, Biggie, Jay-Z, Ludacris, and Tech N9ne as the artists behind his rhythm and delivery, and holds a degree in Digital Production spanning both film and audio — training that shows in how deliberately Seriously is put together, even on a three-week timeline.
Murko is currently negotiating a hybrid publishing deal for a novella and continuing work on the film trilogy Seriously sets up.