LCD Soundsystem

Essential Albums

  • This Is Happening
    This Is Happening
    This Is Happening

    As the mastermind behind LCD Soundsystem, James Murphy has always knowingly played with rock-star tropes. So when he and his entourage were spotted around Hollywood dressed in head-to-toe white in the summer of 2009, it was clear the outfit’s third full-length would be the time-honored LA album. Always on the nose, Murphy set up shop in a dilapidated mansion in Laurel Canyon that had once been the home of Errol Flynn, and where super-producer (and current owner) Rick Rubin had famously recorded the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ seminal Blood Sugar Sex Magik. (It was also rumored that Harry Houdini had lived in the house, giving it a haunted reputation that members of the LCD entourage did little to dispel.) Throughout the recording of what would become 2010’s This Is Happening, Murphy and his housemates covered a wall with Polaroids of various hipster luminaries who’d dropped by the house for late-night shenanigans. The resulting album pays tribute to another famously haunted LA transplant: David Bowie. His influence can be found all over This Is Happening, from the louche strut of “Somebody’s Calling Me”—a sonic homage to Bowie’s “Nightclubbing” collaboration with Iggy Pop—to the cover image, which recalls the art of Bowie’s Lodger album. Another parallel with late-1970s Berlin-era Bowie is that the famously polyamorous star had recently become estranged from his wife Angie—and Murphy was still dealing with a divorce before he began writing the songs on This Is Happening. His feelings about romance at that time can be gleaned from lyrics like “Love is a murderer” (from “I Can Change”), while his complicated relationship with another consort, the music business, is neatly summed up in the title of “You Wanted A Hit.” (The punchline? “But maybe we don’t do hits.”) Hits or not, LCD Soundsystem was now big enough to be billed just below Jay-Z for Coachella 2010. But a month before that performance (and two months prior to the album’s release), Murphy announced that This Is Happening would be the final LCD Soundsystem album. Another rock-star trope—though many fans, rightfully, suspected LCD’s demise wasn’t actually happening.

  • Sound of Silver
    Sound of Silver
    Sound of Silver

    Halfway through the recording of his second album as LCD Soundsystem, James Murphy was, in his words, “suicidal.” Toiling alone in the same rural Massachusetts studio where he’d recorded LCD’s 2005 debut, Murphy covered the studio walls with silver fabric and aluminum foil. But it wasn’t able to block out his self-doubt: LCD may have made the thirtysomething Murphy the unlikely figurehead of the early-2000s NYC dance-punk movement, but before that, he’d spent a decade trying to build a music career—and failing. His solution came from an unlikely place: A commission from Nike to compose a single 45-minute piece of music for its Original Run series with iTunes. The fact that Murphy clearly wasn’t much of a runner didn’t play into the brand calculus. Nor did the fact that the resulting 45-minute, 33-second track—named “45:33”—was an overt nod to experimental icons like John Cage and Manuel Göttsching. Both were the kind of artists Murphy might have name-checked a few years earlier on his breakthrough debut single, “Losing My Edge.” But in creating a work that he felt could stand alongside these two underground heroes, Murphy seemed to cast off the meta-narrative of the uncool cool guy that had served as his calling card during LCD’s rise. Murphy’s Nike project would play a major role in LCD Soundsystem’s 2007 breakthrough, Sound of Silver (for starters, one of the album's highlights, “Someone Great,” began life as an instrumental segment of “45:33”). The album retains Murphy’s real-life-specific songwriting, and found him starting to move away from the wry self-referencing of the same New York scene the birthed LCD. “North American Scum” whisks its protagonist to Europe “where they go all night.” And the album's apex, “All My Friends,” finds Murphy admitting that he'd spent “the first five years trying to get with the plan”—and that he was now caught up in a professionalized party lifestyle—one in which the only things missing were actual friends.

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About LCD Soundsystem

By the time he formed LCD Soundsystem in 2002, James Murphy had already lived several lives in New York's music scene, variously working as a DJ, engineer, and producer in addition to co-founding DFA Records. But Murphy—born in Princeton Junction, NJ, in 1970—didn't find the right vehicle for his alternately hopeful and cantankerous sensibility until LCD Soundsystem. Initially a solo venture for Murphy before expanding to include regulars like vocalist/keyboardist Nancy Whang and bassist Tyler Pope, the band swiftly attracted acclaim for its thrilling combination of dance-punk grooves and art-rock experimentation, along with the snarky humor that filled songs like 2002's withering "Losing My Edge" and 2005's exhilarating "Daft Punk Is Playing at My House." After the release of 2010's triumphant This Is Happening, Murphy ended the band with a final concert at Madison Square Garden in 2011. Five years later, LCD Soundsystem's reunion launched a new chapter.

ORIGIN
New York, NY, United States
FORMED
2001
GENRE
Electronic

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