Love Fame Tragedy declare Life Is A Killer.

Love Fame Tragedy is the solo project of Wombats frontman Matthew Murphy. Their 2020 debut album, Wherever I Go, I Want to Leave, featuring musicians such as Pixies guitarist Joey Santiago and Alt-J’s Gus Unger-Hamilton, will be followed next month by Life Is a Killer.

The album was recorded in Los Angeles, where Murphy is now based, before being mixed in London. He says that the music industry has increasingly shifted to LA over recent years: “It seems like London, LA and Nashville are the hubs for creativity now – and the music industry in LA is becoming even more the case. People are just going to go to wherever the best songwriters and producers are.” It’s also been a more positive environment for Murphy personally. “I do think that LA has been amazing for me, just by virtue of the fact that I feel like I’m 10% to 15% happier here than I was living in London, and therefore I’m automatically 10% to 15% more productive. A good percentage of that is probably weather-related but it’s also where I live in Mount Washington: it’s like everyone is cordial, and you say hi to people and talk to them on the street. In Liverpool and in Shoreditch [where he lived previously] that was not what was happening, everyone was very much on their own thing. I have a bit more human connection here than I did when I was living in the UK. I don’t think that’s the UK’s problem, that’s my problem for just acting like a bit of a fucking lone wolf all the time.”

That lone wolf tendency was part of the appeal of Love Fame Tragedy, especially for the new album which features fewer collaborations than its predecessor. “I wanted to experience what a recording process was like just with myself and a producer, being able to go and hire a sax player without having to OK it with two people first. Just to see what that experience was like, and to see what could happen – I think that was my primary reason for doing it.” But he admits that it didn’t turn out to be as simple and liberating as he’d hoped. “What I’ve now uncovered is that every single album is a big fucking box of frogs anyway, so it doesn’t matter whether you do it with other band members or by yourself, or how crazy the producer is, or how calm and collected the producer is, every single album is a different box of frogs. So that’s what I’ve learnt.”

“It was the last song written that made the album, which was at the most extreme part of what was happening before I made the decision to go sober. So lyrically that’s a very important one for me”

— Matthew

Life Is a Killer could be the ultimate expression of Murphy’s trademark marriage of bright pop melodies with his darkest thoughts. “I like hooky pop music, but I like to put content on top of that hooky pop music that is really not supposed to be on there.” The lyrics track him through a turbulent time, exacerbated by longstanding mental health and substance issues, with “Tangerine Milkshake” the most raw but also the most significant song for Murphy. “It was the last song written that made the album, which was at the most extreme part of what was happening before I made the decision to go sober. So lyrically that’s a very important one for me from the album – and from anything I’ve ever done – just talking about making horrendous mistakes, and then thinking that buying my wife a Gucci bag in the airport is going to somehow pull us back together, or make up for them.”

Murphy’s music often incorporates elements specific to the period during which was created – “I like it when there’s something happening around the songs and the production that lock it into when it was being recorded, or when it was being written” – but Life Is a Killer is made even more authentically personal by the inclusion of voice notes from Murphy and his wife, Akemi Topel. At one point she can be heard complaining that yet again his songs are casting her as the villain and him as the victim. “It’s a conversation that we always have. It’s like on 95% of the best songs, the protagonist is the victim. It’s very unusual for it to be the other way around. I just thought it was so funny, like there was no way it couldn’t go on there.”

The original idea came from producer Jacknife Lee. “We were just talking, and he said, ‘Do you have any voice notes?’ We started placing them in songs and around them. That was a kind of conversation between me and Jacknife about giving it something more than just eleven songs well recorded, produced and put out into the world. I want that little bit extra: it makes it stronger; it makes it feel like a house made of bricks rather than a house made of plywood.” When Mark Crew took over production halfway through recording, he encouraged Murphy to add even more voice notes. “He sent me the instrumental with the voice note, and then the instrumental by itself, and it was like, ‘I don’t know what to do here,’ and then I was like, ‘Fuck it, we’ll just do both,’ because they both felt good.”

Murphy is planning some live performances for Love Fame Tragedy this year and in the meantime his focus has shifted back to the Wombats, whose sixth album is underway. Their previous long-player, Fix Yourself, Not the World, topped the UK album charts on its release in 2022 but Murphy says he has no illusions that Life Is a Killer will reach those heights. “The chances that it takes off on any chart is slim, and that’s not why I did it. I’d written about forty songs and I was like, ‘This is a great opportunity to make the best album that I possibly can,’ and I’m pretty proud of it. This is the third album I’ve been a part of that I’ve listened to from start to finish and gone, ‘OK, yeah, that’s good.’ Like the Wombats’ first album, or fourth album, and this – especially this. I listen to it, and I go, ‘That represents me, and is interesting from start to finish,’ and that’s all I can really do. I try to remove all expectations these days, and just put out the best thing I can.”

Life Is a Killer is out 29th March. View the latest single It’s OK To Be Shallow below.

Author: Rachel Goodyear