When an artist like Martha Sky Murphy arrives, it pays to stop and take notice. Previously heard singing on the likes of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds' Push The Sky Away and Squid's Bright Green Field, Murphy has also collaborated with local hero Roy Montgomery, who offers his services on this new album Um in return. Both beautiful and unsettling, Um finds Murphy exploring what she calls the "guttural reality of how the voice sits within the body". - Flying Out
Meaning shifts throughout Martha Skye Murphy's debut album ‘Um’ with songs that meld moments of baroque beauty with crashes of electronic noise, employing textures that are by turns organic and artificial, hi-fi and lo-fi.
Collaborations with the likes of Claire Rousay and Roy Montgomery are finely intertwined with the fruits of rigorous studio sessions with producer Ethan P. Flynn.
Lyrically Murphy conjures images inspired by everything from Ancient Roman hand-binding torture to a Fred and Ginger tap routine. A deep sense of longing and echoes of lost, distant memory haunt the record.
“I wanted the album to feel like this constant tension between being in a very intimate domestic space, and then being propelled into a far stranger environment that is difficult to situate,” she says. “I want people to feel disoriented, erotically charged by the intimacy of a bedroom, then catapulted into a desert.”
Tracklist
- First Day
- Need (ft. Roy Montgomery)
- Pick Yourself Up
- Theme Parks
- Spray Can
- Call Me Back
- Kind
- The Words
- Dust Yourself Off
- IRL
- Forgive (ft. Claire Rousay)