Less than a year since reviving his Chet Faker moniker, five-time ARIA Award winning songwriter and artist Nick Murphy has today released the sophomore album from his Chet Faker project.
The stupendously good 'Hotel Surrender' is a ten-track album written, recorded and produced by New York-based Murphy – a record he completed in the first few months of the global pandemic. It was mixed by Dave Fridmann (Tame Impala, Flaming Lips, MGMT)."There were a lot of heavy perspective shifters for me," Murphy says. "I really just thought of the music in a different light. I look at it as a mass therapy now.
"I think I used to see it as this plight, like I was on a crusade or this creative odyssey. Now I see that it's more Shamanistic. You've got to find some light – or sometimes dark, whatever's right – and share it.
"I realised that was the heart of the Chet Faker project; and I felt like the world was hurting, so I thought, 'I can do a small something to give people some joy'."
The album features his comeback track 'Low' as well as previous 2021 singles 'Get High', 'Whatever Tomorrow' and 'Feel Good'.
Finding himself working in isolation, Murphy began to write material that was 'striving to find joy and light in an otherwise dark time'. "Chet Faker I'd only known as long as all these other people had known, and they all had these ideas about what it was," Murphy asserts.
"I just needed to kind of let loose; and I'm glad I did, because it allowed me to contextualise the Chet Faker project.
"It allowed me to expand and learn so many new things without having to deal with resistance based on what I built already with Chet. It got me really excited to make music again."
The past few years have allowed Nick to accept himself and not allow outside detractors to govern his own happiness. "I think I've always been a feel-good kind of person, but I was self-conscious of it because I was aware that I could be judged for that," Nick admits.
"Cheesy or whatever be damned, I just don't care anymore. If someone thinks it's lame, I feel bad for them. Because I know how good it can feel if you just let go.
"To write truly happy music, you've got to really get to know your own sadness; and that's the work that got me here. I've had enough of the misery."
