![]() “I’d just be humming, or I got it wrong, and he’d use that bit,” Murphy recalls. Not only did some songs veer off wildly, Koze also had a penchant for working in sources that weren’t ever meant for the recording-banter, asides, adlibs. “I’ve never sounded like that before, so why not? Just go for it.”) The steely “Can’t Replicate” went through innumerable changes, morphing across G-funk and dream pop before arriving at its final form: seven and a half minutes of pumping deep house in which Murphy’s breathy incantations come to feel like desire incarnate. ![]() “Two Ways” began as a country song but turned into a contorted trap anthem. “You have to be quite open to experimentation.”Īlbum opener “What Not to Do” started out over a reggae beat and ended up as futuristic cybersoul, skulking as ominously as a Boston Dynamics robot dog. “Before you know it, we could actually split one song into four other songs,” Murphy says. The finished song could have a different tempo, a different key, a whole different vibe. The process was anything but linear: Koze would send a beat, Murphy would sing over it and send it back, and then-usually the next morning, after working late into the night-Koze would shoot over a new version that might sound completely different. Previously, most of her records had been made in professional studios, but now she rigged up a mic in the bedroom and learned the rudiments of Ableton. Lockdown turned out to be the perfect incubator for the pair’s exploratory, long-distance creative rhythm. While she was promoting Róisín Machine, Murphy’s album with Koze was already bubbling away, as the two artists swapped files back and forth. “I’ve never lived through a time where music suddenly became the most important thing in people’s lives. “Everyone had this response, like, ‘You’ve saved me,’” she adds, recalling the way fans took solace in the album’s intricately rendered disco fantasies, her record a lifeline to what suddenly looked like a lost world. “It was shit that I made a club record when there were no clubs,” she says, laughing. There was just one problem: It dropped nine months into COVID, right before a major wave of infections in Europe and the Americas. Her previous record, Róisín Machine, re-introduced her as queen of the dance, a smoky-throated dynamo illuminated by strobing lasers and glitter-ball ripples. Hit Parade, which builds upon the creative partnership that Murphy and Koze initiated with a pair of songs for his 2018 album Knock Knock, feels like a victory lap for the singer. “Here, you always feel you’re in a soft place.” It’s a bit fally-downy, but we love it,” she says in her lilting Irish accent. Murphy and Properzi moved here from London with their kids at the beginning of the pandemic. While I’m inspecting the hulking black PA system, a lizard darts beneath one of the speakers. Despite the unobtrusive presence of a pink-haired housekeeper, the living room wears the reassuring clutter of everyday life. A triptych of vintage posters by Sheffield’s Designers Republic-masterminds of the rave era’s cybernetic aesthetic-testifies to her youth in the UK’s dynamic club scene in the early 1990s. In the dining room stand two six-foot speaker stacks that look like something out of Doctor Who, purchased years ago off “some dodgy Italians” in London. Kaleidoscopically unpredictable, bursting with ideas, and highlighting aspects of her voice she’s never shown before, it’s the kind of career-burnishing feat most artists can only dream of making.Īs Murphy pads around the house in a light blue linen shirt, faded jeans, and green leather espadrilles, silver bangles dangling from her wrist, she’s surrounded by vestiges of a life spent in and around club culture. Now 49, Murphy is preparing to release her sixth album, Hit Parade, a psychedelic collaboration with the German techno trickster DJ Koze that sounds like the culmination of a lifetime spent dancing around pop’s fringes. “She has been able to create international bangers yet still remains totally original and never follows a trend. “There is a strength and a command that Róisín generates as a solo artist, particularly as a woman within the dance world,” says Ware. For nearly three decades, the Irish singer, songwriter, sometime DJ, and forever fashion maven has turned an insouciant spirit into her life’s work-first, in the 1990s, as a member of the spunky disco-pop duo Moloko and then, since 2005, as a solo artist whose fusions of pop and dance helped pave the way for bespoke stars like Charli XCX and Jessie Ware. If there’s one thing that doesn’t fly in Murphy’s universe, it’s needless perfectionism.
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