It’s Friday afternoon in Ibiza, and Róisín Murphy is considering her options for the night ahead. It doesn’t sound certain, or even likely, that she’ll actually hit the clubs—there are concerts to be planned, an upcoming video to shoot, and design decisions for her forthcoming album to be made—but on this infamous Mediterranean destination, where Murphy has lived for the last three years, dance music is just part of the air around you, as unshakable as the morning sun beating down on bleary-eyed ravers. Sitting behind the wheel of Murphy’s Toyota hybrid en route to lunch, her assistant Isabella mentions a popular tech-house DJ who’s on the lineup at a nearby hotspot. Murphy scoffs. “DJ Spreadsheet? DJ PowerPoint Presentation?” she cackles. “He’s good, but he’s too perfect. It’s boring.”
If there’s one thing that doesn’t fly in Murphy’s universe, it’s needless perfectionism. For nearly three decades, the Irish singer, songwriter, sometime DJ, and forever fashion maven has turned an insouciant spirit into her life’s work—first, in the 1990s, as a member of the spunky disco-pop duo Moloko and then, since 2005, as a solo artist whose fusions of pop and dance helped pave the way for bespoke stars like Charli XCX and Jessie Ware. “There is a strength and a command that Róisín generates as a solo artist, particularly as a woman within the dance world,” says Ware. “She has been able to create international bangers yet still remains totally original and never follows a trend. She is a pioneer and always has been.”
Now 49, Murphy is preparing to release her sixth album, Hit Parade, a psychedelic collaboration with the German techno trickster DJ Koze that sounds like the culmination of a lifetime spent dancing around pop’s fringes. Kaleidoscopically unpredictable, bursting with ideas, and highlighting aspects of her voice she’s never shown before, it’s the kind of career-burnishing feat most artists can only dream of making.
At Murphy’s airy home in the hills, Ibiza’s hedonistic party scene feels far away. Weights and gym equipment are strewn across the lawn, a slackline is strung between two trees, and a child’s Pokémon T-shirt hangs inside out on a laundry rack in the driveway. Out on the patio, hanging askew, there’s a painted birdcage that Murphy reckons got liberated from a nightclub one blurry morning, long ago.
The house is shaded by pines and surrounded by neighboring fig groves and vineyards, accessible only via a dusty gravel road. “It’s very private,” she says of the place, which her partner—Sebastiano Properzi, a former member of the house duo Luca C & Brigante—has owned for a quarter century, since long before the pleasure-seeking one-percenters sent property values skyrocketing.
As Murphy pads around the house in a light blue linen shirt, faded jeans, and green leather espadrilles, silver bangles dangling from her wrist, she’s surrounded by vestiges of a life spent in and around club culture. In the dining room stand two six-foot speaker stacks that look like something out of Doctor Who, purchased years ago off “some dodgy Italians” in London. A triptych of vintage posters by Sheffield’s Designers Republic—masterminds of the rave era’s cybernetic aesthetic—testifies to her youth in the UK’s dynamic club scene in the early 1990s. Despite the unobtrusive presence of a pink-haired housekeeper, the living room wears the reassuring clutter of everyday life. While I’m inspecting the hulking black PA system, a lizard darts beneath one of the speakers.
Murphy and Properzi moved here from London with their kids at the beginning of the pandemic. “It’s not your usual Ibiza house. It’s a bit fally-downy, but we love it,” she says in her lilting Irish accent. “Here, you always feel you’re in a soft place.”
Róisín Murphy performing her song “Something More” in and around her Ibiza home during the 2020 lockdown
Hit Parade, which builds upon the creative partnership that Murphy and Koze initiated with a pair of songs for his 2018 album Knock Knock, feels like a victory lap for the singer. Her previous record, Róisín Machine, re-introduced her as queen of the dance, a smoky-throated dynamo illuminated by strobing lasers and glitter-ball ripples. There was just one problem: It dropped nine months into COVID, right before a major wave of infections in Europe and the Americas.
“It was shit that I made a club record when there were no clubs,” she says, laughing. But the timing was also weirdly perfect. “Everyone had this response, like, ‘You’ve saved me,’” she adds, recalling the way fans took solace in the album’s intricately rendered disco fantasies, her record a lifeline to what suddenly looked like a lost world. “I’ve never lived through a time where music suddenly became the most important thing in people’s lives. They poured themselves into it.”
While she was promoting Róisín Machine, Murphy’s album with Koze was already bubbling away, as the two artists swapped files back and forth. Lockdown turned out to be the perfect incubator for the pair’s exploratory, long-distance creative rhythm. Previously, most of her records had been made in professional studios, but now she rigged up a mic in the bedroom and learned the rudiments of Ableton.
The process was anything but linear: Koze would send a beat, Murphy would sing over it and send it back, and then—usually the next morning, after working late into the night—Koze would shoot over a new version that might sound completely different. The finished song could have a different tempo, a different key, a whole different vibe. “Before you know it, we could actually split one song into four other songs,” Murphy says. “You have to be quite open to experimentation.”
Album opener “What Not to Do” started out over a reggae beat and ended up as futuristic cybersoul, skulking as ominously as a Boston Dynamics robot dog. “Two Ways” began as a country song but turned into a contorted trap anthem. (“Fuckin’ brilliant,” marvels Murphy. “I’ve never sounded like that before, so why not? Just go for it.”) The steely “Can’t Replicate” went through innumerable changes, morphing across G-funk and dream pop before arriving at its final form: seven and a half minutes of pumping deep house in which Murphy’s breathy incantations come to feel like desire incarnate.
Not only did some songs veer off wildly, Koze also had a penchant for working in sources that weren’t ever meant for the recording—banter, asides, adlibs. “I’d just be humming, or I got it wrong, and he’d use that bit,” Murphy recalls. Koze loved to bait her, psyching her up with an interminable series of messages whenever he had a particularly juicy new draft to send over: Are you sitting down? Have you had a cup of coffee? Are you ready? A voicemail she left him in return, purring expectantly—“C’mon, I’m really ready now”—became the spoken-word intro to the album. There was a flipside to Koze’s roguish approach, she cautions: “Be careful where you put your voice, because it could end up on the fuckin’ record.”
The result is not just Murphy’s most wide-ranging album yet, but also her most surreal, letting loose both sides of her personality: the prodigiously talented singer and the world-class cutup with a deadpan sense of humor and zero inhibitions. Some of the madcap characters she plays in a spiraling set of TikTok and Instagram videos even infiltrated the album: On dreamy recent single “The Universe,” she affects a garish American accent and improvises a cruise-ship scene fit for The White Lotus. But contrasts that might look jarring on paper only open up new dimensions in her music, dynamiting the fourth wall to reveal a psychedelic panorama undulating behind it—one that could only come from these two hyperactive minds.
Yet to hear both Murphy and Koze tell it, the album came very close to not happening at all, at least not in this form, even though it’s been nearly finished for more than two years. “You can imagine what it’s like,” Koze tells me over the phone from Tortosa, Spain, where he’s hiking in the hills. “Two strong characters—weirdos living in their own fantasy. Sometimes that matches and sometimes it doesn’t.”
By his own admission, Koze is “not a good finisher”—not only a perfectionist, but someone who constantly changes his mind about what he wants; Murphy estimates that 40 percent of the album wouldn’t exist if it had been up to him. “He would’ve put it all in the bin,” she adds. “I had to fight, and go, ‘No, that is a good song. Finish it.’ Numerous times.” When I ask her which songs, she laughs. “Probably all of them, at some point! You’d be surprised. Some of the best ones. But that’s where I came in.”
As the taskmaster?
“Not at all! Jeez, you wouldn’t be able to taskmaster him. He kept me at arm’s distance. He needs to be able to do whatever he fuckin’ wants, nobody breathing down his neck.”
But Murphy also concedes that the album’s highly detailed textures and shifting shapes are the ultimate vindication of Koze’s unconventional methods. “Everything comes down to one question: Does it sound good?” she says: “Not, ‘How long did I spend on that? How hard was it to play this?’ No. Does it sound good? ‘Yes.’ OK, it stays. ‘Not really?’ Then it goes!”
The album was Koze’s idea in the first place, a way to take her places she’d never been encouraged to go. “I always thought her voice and way of singing and writing lyrics is much bigger than the disco context that she’s done so often,” he tells me. On stage, Murphy is famous for cycling through innumerable costume changes, a never-ending stream of ballooning capes, outlandish hats, and head-to-toe spangles; Koze envisioned the album wrapping her up in a similarly dazzling array of sonic fabrics.
Hit Parade has Murphy showcasing the range of her voice not just stylistically, flipping from ballads to bangers, but in the way she explores every aspect of it: sandy, breathy, severe, gentle; caterwauling, cooing, hissing, belting, pleading, celebrating; leaping for joy, scowling with dejection, slipping wantonly between notes. Aided by Koze’s liquid blend of vintage soul and digital mischief, she locates entirely new pockets of marbled texture and elastic timbre in every drawn-out syllable.
“Her voice,” Koze says, “is a national treasure.”
On the way to a steak restaurant in a nearby town for lunch, as Max Romeo’s reggae classic “One Step Forward” plays at top volume from her car’s speakers, Murphy realizes she has left her debit card at home; later, leaving lunch, her phone will go missing. (It turns up in the house, right where she left it.) Fortunately, her assistant Isabella—who Murphy recruited after coming across her meme-heavy Róisín Murphy fan page—is there to keep things running smoothly.
At the restaurant, Murphy and I appear to be the only non-Spaniards in the room—a rarity in Ibiza. The walls are lined with framed photographs of famous and semi-famous patrons, including the veteran DJ Carl Cox, a fixture on Ibiza for decades. We eat bitter green olives, frightfully garlicky aioli, and chuletón grilled on a little tabletop hibachi, washing it down with beer as Murphy regales me with stories of her youth.
She spent the first years of her life in Arklow, a small seaside town of about 8,000 in the southeast of Ireland. It was a humble upbringing: no microwave, no VCR, no indoor heating, not even a telephone. But the household was rich in culture. Her parents were antiques dealers (“wheeler-dealers,” she calls them), and the home was filled with books and art and knowledge. “I’d know something Victorian from something Edwardian; I’d know how old things were, how much things were worth.” Her parents, she adds, “were like film stars—both really beautiful and really special.”
Still, there were growing pains. “I was a bit naughty in me pre-teens,” she admits. She was constantly picking and losing fights, the kind where the whole school would gather on the playground to watch. She went through a shoplifting spell as well, and briefly resumed it when, at 12, her family moved to Manchester, England, where she was surrounded by a bounty of material goods the likes of which she’d never seen. “I used to get out to the shopping centers and spend hours trying on cocktail dresses,” she recalls. “I was absolutely dazzled by the sheer copiousness of capitalism, always one for wanting stuff. It’s a disaster, really, to want stuff. A disaster!”
But then she calmed down. “Found my comfort zone,” she says. At 13, she fell in with a group of boys who were into the Jesus and Mary Chain, and went out to see Sonic Youth. She got obsessed with buying records, going to gigs, and hanging out with the guys. (“No sex,” she clarifies. “Just like, ‘We really love music.’ They understand me and I understand them.”) She wonders if those friendships set the template for her future choice of collaborators, like sampling maverick Matthew Herbert, house iconoclast Maurice Fulton, and Koze. “Not to say I can’t work with women—I work with women all the time,” she says. “But I haven’t made music seriously with another female collaborator. Maybe it’s something about the way I came into loving music. I was just one of the lads—and I can be one of the lads.”
When she was 15, her parents split up and separately went back to Ireland. Murphy, enamored with the freedom she’d discovered in Manchester, refused to go with them. “I didn’t leave home, home left me,” she stresses. “Everybody’s family has these moments where it goes nuclear. It was at that moment when I thought, Nobody really has any time for me, so I’m just going to stay here.” Music also played a big part in her decision. By that point, her post-punk dalliances had given way to immersion in the city’s vibrant house-music scene. “It was as shallow as: I can’t go back, they’re all into heavy metal. Gotta stay where I can go to gigs, buy records, and start to educate myself—because I certainly didn’t do that at school.”
Thanks to government housing benefits, she found a room in a flat with an outdoor toilet. She got a job at a sandwich shop, though she didn’t last long there, or anywhere, really. Mostly, she immersed herself in music and became a fixture on the local scene, dancing all night in PVC jeans, her head shaved. Long before she and her then-boyfriend Mark Brydon launched Moloko, the duo that would take them around the world, putting out four albums in seven years, Warp Records co-founder Rob Mitchell used to tell her, “I don’t know what you want to be, Róisín, but you’re going to be something.”
I ask if she worries about her own kids discovering their independence in similar ways. “It’s kind of irrelevant. Never going to happen to my children,” she says. “First of all, the world’s not there to support them.” It’s true; the British welfare state, which allowed her the freedom to forge her own path in the early ’90s, is a shadow of its former self. “But anyway,” she adds, “hopefully I’m not in as unhappy a marriage as my mother and father were.”
Murphy’s daughter Clodagh, with her ex Simon Henwood, was born in 2009, but the couple split within a year, leaving Murphy feeling like she had failed at family life. “When I met Sebi, it was fuckin’ miraculous to me that I had another chance,” she says of her current partner. “When I had the second child”—Tadhg, born in 2012—“I couldn’t have been more happy to achieve a family. I was on cloud nine for years.”
That joy permeates Hit Parade. Many of its songs—particularly “CooCool,” a birds-and-the-bees ode to finding romance later in life—are about the ecstasy of love, the vastness of it. But it’s not a one-note album. The plaintive “Hurtz So Bad” is a pillowy lament about unrequited desire. “The House” riffs on a dystopian JG Ballard story she was reading during the pandemic. And the last song, “Eureka,” goes to an unexpectedly dark place. The lyrics are ambiguous, but they are as somber as the production is shimmering. “What the doctor said,” she sings, her voice husky and tentative. “He took one look at me/Told me he could see/There was something there.”
When I ask what it’s about, she answers with a question: “Do you start thinking about death, as you get older?” She wrote it before her father, who suffered Parkinson’s, died in December 2021. “I just went there with it, into a place about death. About people being able to see sickness in you.”
Back at her house, we sit on the patio and drink coffee, and Murphy becomes more reflective. She’s been thinking about loss—of her father, but also the loss of the culture she came from, the freedom she enjoyed as a child, the generosity and warmth of the community, the pubs where people spent their free time. “And the music!” she exclaims. “All the time music, everybody’s singing constantly, like living in an MGM musical. There was this vast pool of charm and intelligence that seemed like it went on forever when I was a kid. Lots of problems, too, but I wouldn’t have it any different. It’s hard for me, the loss of that culture. When people die, it’s one bit more gone. Another one gone. Another one gone.”
Before she and Isabella give me a ride to the airport, Murphy tells me about the video she is about to shoot and direct in Arklow, for Hit Parade’s latest single, “Fader.” She’s gotten permission to shut down the town’s main drag and hold an actual parade, nodding at once to the album’s title and to the community that raised her. She’s thinking of it like Public Enemy’s Spike Lee-directed “Fight the Power” video crossed with a traditional Irish street procession. “I want it to feel joyful, but there’s also stuff about death in the song,” she says. “And there’s always an energy when there’s a large group; I want that slight ‘Don’t fuck with us’ edge.” It’s simple, she explains: If you take a fairly cool person walking down the street and film it nicely, it looks cool. “Your character comes across when you walk, in the most visceral way. Walking is much better than standing.”
The week after the shoot, I call her up to find out how it went. “It was one of the best days of my whole life,” she says. The whole town came out: dance troupes, a brass band, a group of eight girls in Communion dresses. She met friends that her father had known, and walked past places that her grandfather had built, and past the building that used to house her grandmother’s fish and chips shop and snooker hall.
When it was all done, they retired to the pub across the road from her Aunt Linda’s house. “It sounds terrible, but it’s the pub I was brought up in,” she says. “It was like another living room for our family.” There, they shot additional footage in which she shouts up to her aunt’s window, because that was how you used to communicate in those days—“You comin’ over, Linda?”—and her aunt comes down to the pub, where Murphy sings “Fader” a cappella: “Off to meet my maker/When I’m good and ready.”
Her voice softens, and she shakes her head with wonder. “I’m going to be 50 in July,” she says, “but I came out of that saying, ‘I don’t need anything more for my birthday now.’”
