“You can keep doing your juice cleanses”: Matthew Murphy on love, fame and tragedy
If you think that music has significantly progressed in the past few decades, you haven’t been paying attention to the juice industry. It seems that now there are more juices to drink than there are liquids in the universe, as it’s impossible to stroll down the street without having the latest miracle cure / delectable drink shoved down your throat. The juice craze is well and truly among us, and Wombats and Love Fame Tragedy frontman Matthew Murphy says to have at it.
“The whole fucking juice thing, you know, it’s just all of these mad juices, loads of mad ingredients and no data to back up whether these mad ingredients actually help or do anything for you,” the conversation arises as we discuss the possibility that a tangerine milkshake exists, a decent sounded concoction but also the title of one of the leading tracks from Love Fame Tragedy’s new album, Life Is A Killer.
“I’ve never heard of a tangerine milkshake but thought it was a ridiculous concept. I guess it’s more of a joke at, like, I’ll keep trying to drink my feelings or use addictive behaviour to combat the internal hurricane that’s spinning around, but you can keep doing your juice cleanses,” he adds. “The song is about the dichotomy of an addict and someone who is probably also an addict, but they’re just addicted to better things than you are.”
This is a common theme throughout the album, which sees The Wombats frontman step out from the collective bubble of a band and branch into solo material. Love Fame Tragedy did release another album in 2020, Where I Go, I Want To Leave, but that pesky pandemic shot down any momentum the record picked up and cut down the prospect of live gigs. Life Is A Killer marks the first time Murphy’s solo outing has truly been given room to run.
Donning the shroud of the solo artist once more, we see the most vulnerable side to Murphy yet, as the new album contains voicemails from feuds with his wife, a healthy dose of nihilism and songs conjured up from the recesses of addiction and downward spirals. The product is something equal parts emotional but pop-infused enough to still cram dancefloors and bring smiles to people’s faces. No one else is happier with the album than Murphy himself, who feels such an affinity towards it he has done someone he usually wouldn’t: listen to it.
“I have listened to two Wombats albums, the first and the fourth, from start to finish, maybe two or three times. But yeah, it’s not something I find myself doing because I’m a highly self-critical person… It’s more like an endurance test than it is pure enjoyment for me. Whereas this second album wasn’t, so I guess that’s how I know I’ve done something I’m happy with.”
And the secret to being happy with your work? It’s twofold. One: shut out external voices. Two: accept that time is finite. “I just feel a bit more confident and more acutely aware of how much time I have left on this bizarre spinning globe, so I’m just like, you need to just get it out and not overthink it or not worry about what people are going to think of you. I’ve spent too long doing that.”
In having a more open approach to his music, the result is, unsurprisingly, a sound which is also more open. Murphy talks about his darkest days throughout this album, but not in a way where he feels sorry for himself, more in that he acknowledges those times that happened and now they’ve passed. The addictive theme of ‘Tangerine Milkshake’ is just the tip of the iceberg, but expressing elements of his true self and not worrying about how others may interpret them has helped in music and his everyday life.
“I seem to be spending a lot of my time dropping my kids off at school and trying to make conversation with parents and stuff, but I just can’t have those kinds of surface-level conversations sometimes. So, I just go straight in with something fucking bizarre, and then I’ve found that I’ve made some really close friends by doing this because the ones that react and are completely open with me, we form a really nice friendship.”
The album acts as a contradiction of itself in two different ways. The first being that a lot of the hard times Murphy went through in the past were because of music. Management, scheduling and relentless touring took their toll on him, as they do for a lot of artists. And yet, music remains the thing he can turn to for comfort during these difficult periods.
“My relationship to music is already complicated, and I think that’s because I’m like very driven, and I have no idea how to stop… It’s a relationship rather than something I can rely on 24/7. I don’t know; I’ve had periods in my life where I’ve dragged myself into rooms to write songs when I really didn’t want to. This album, that wasn’t the case, but there have been times when that was the case because I have this thing in my head where it’s like, well, inspiration is for amateurs, why do I need inspiration? I don’t need that. I can go in there, and if I put in enough work, I will find the inspiration, and that is kind of true, but it’s an exhausting way to go about things.”
The second contradiction comes in the form of the music itself. The lyrics are sad, as Murphy talks about not being the same person he sees in the photographs around his house, but the sound is unequivocally upbeat pop music. Murphy pours his heart out, and we bottle the fluid to make glowsticks.
“It’s like The Smiths kind of effect. Arguably, they were the first to do it or the best to do it. But, you know, Morrisey’s lyrics against fucking Hans Zimmer playing the piano is going to be way different to upbeat melodic stuff… You can kind of get away with a lot more if the picture behind it has a few more unicorns on it. If you’ve got an army of unicorns behind your back, then you could pretty much lay your soul bare, I think.”
An album contradictory in its positivity but heartfelt all the same. As Murphy steps further away from the chatter of casual listeners and throws himself into unrelenting creativity, the music we get is some of the best of his career.
