A Love for Strangers is a complete reinvention for Nick Murphy. His first record as Chet Faker in four years expands his previously established sound in thrilling new directions, with moonlit saxes recalling legendary acts like Prefab Sprout and the Blue Nile as well as the lush, breakbeat-laden pop of David Gray’s classic White Ladder. These 12 songs find Murphy ruminating on heartbreak and uncertainty on a grand, sweeping scale—asking questions about how we relate to each other, examining the ways in which we fail to do so, and extending a necessary sense of hope when it comes to repairing our relationships with the world around us.
Murphy’s follow-up to his previous record as Chet Faker, 2021’s Hotel Surrender, arrives after a string of singles over the past several years as well as his full-band release Take in the Roses as Nick Murphy and the Program. This new work was also brought to fruition following a tumultuous period in the singer-songwriter’s professional and personal life, culminating with his father passing away during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“There was this aftershock that I was trying to make some sense out of,” he reflects. ”It was just an onslaught, and Hotel Surrender was almost a regression from everything that was happening. Anyone that’s ever been through a period of trauma knows that we often have to go into ourselves for a minute, find our own light, and emerge to make sense of everything that happened. This record is me processing everything that happened, and there’s no linear path to processing hardship and trauma.”
On the surface, A Love for Strangers came together similar to how Murphy’s previous records did: “In between albums, I’m writing all the time—collecting songs until there’s enough that feel interrelated,” he says. “All of a sudden, you look at it and you can see what it is, and that’s when you shift up a gear and know that you’re chasing something.” But as he describes the record as a collection of “love songs,” Murphy emphasizes that this music isn’t necessarily directed at one specific subject of affection, as A Love for Strangers thematically zooms in on his journey to “figure out how to develop a sense of immediacy, connection, and trust with people that you don’t know that well. When the world is falling apart, how do you connect with people on that level? Something that I’ve never really felt was a love for strangers, and it’s something that I started to feel—that you choose to love strangers.”
Musically, A Love for Strangers is a return to the sense of restless exploration that led Murphy to make music as Chet Faker in the first place—a sense of personal rediscovery that was sharpened after the 10-year anniversary of his debut, the sensational and career-ascendant Built on Glass. “Playing that record again, there were a lot of reminders of where I’d started, why I’d started, and what I loved about where I was when I started—and that really informed this record,” he reflects. “I got really big really quickly, and with that came a lot of confusion about what I did that people actually loved about my music—and I also wanted to make sure I gave people something they liked. You can only carry so many plates, and over the last couple of years I returned to the beginning, but with all the lessons, developments, and maturity that I’d gained along the way.”
This fresh perspective meant zooming in on new textures and sounds, which is immediately apparent from the rush of drum breaks that kick off A Love for Strangers’ first single “Far Side of the Moon.“ “I wanted the music to have the feeling that you can touch the audio to the point where it washes over you,” he says, elaborating that this latest sonic left turn was equally inspired by White Ladder and the multifarious electronic rock pumping through the radio in the late 1990s: “It’s an ode to my childhood, hearing jungle breakbeats on Playstation games and big beat rave-y stuff in movies. But at the same time, I was just a kid listening to the radio in my mom’s car—those early 2000s pop records with a lot of piano and very clean production alongside the post-grunge sounds that were still circulating. I wanted to bring those sounds together to recreate how it felt to have all this music reach me at the time.”
Much of A Love for Strangers was written over the past three years while Murphy was pulling up roots in NYC and moving to his current home of Tuscon; the impassioned and sophisti-pop-flavored “Remember Me,” featuring a passionate vocal from Murphy at its center was somewhat surprisingly written during a time in which he couldn’t sing at all. “I lost my voice and couldn’t talk,” he recalls. “But I could hear this song in my head, so I made a voice memo of me whistling. I had to wait for months before I could really sing it, which I’d never experienced before.”
Save for some contributions from Simon Lam of Melbourne band Armlock on “Far Side of the Moon,” Murphy’s work on A Love for Strangers was mostly a solo endeavor, right down to mixing most of the record himself. “I knew how I wanted it to feel and sound, and it was becoming really difficult to convey that to people who I’d worked with,” Murphy explains. “I had a really specific sound in mind, and it was a lot of work to get it to that point.”
The result is a literal labor of love, that last word looming large across A Love for Strangers. The mental paralysis of falling for someone is streaked across the gorgeously rainy horns and breakbeats of “A Thousand Ways,” while the deceptively upbeat “This Time For Real,” resembling a 2020s update of Len’s “Steal My Sunshine,” finds Murphy at his most cheekily self-referential, addressing the balanced weight of expectation that comes with success as an artist.
Then there’s the pure head-rush of “Far Side of the Moon,” which addresses lost love as well as the blurred lines between devotion and despair: “It’s about stretching yourself too thin for someone you love to the point where it’s not healthy for the relationship at all.” And that sense of reflection ties into the record’s overarching theme of finding yourself in a sea of millions—all the while trying not to lose sight of who’s around you. “This record is an attempt at self-healing for me.” he explains. “It’s me trying to figure out how to connect with people in the healthiest way and find my footing.” As a result, Murphy has emerged with the most empathetic record of his career, a collection of music that will surely bring listeners together in myriad ways.
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