Martha Skye Murphy is both a rookie and a veteran, as “Um” is her first proper album but far from her introduction to making music. She has EPs, singles, collaborations, and an electronic opera (Postcards Home) dating back to 2016, and her impressive résumé goes back even further than that; she sang on a Nick Cave song that sound-tracked the opening credits of John Hillcoat’s The Proposition when she was just nine years old. (She again collaborated with Cave in her teens when she sang on 2013’s “Push the Sky Away.)
Meaning shifts throughout Martha Skye Murphy’s debut album ‘Um’ with songs that meld moments of baroque beauty with crashes of electronic noise, employing textures that are by turns organic and artificial, hi-fi and lo-fi. Collaborations with the likes of Claire Rousay and Roy Montgomery are finely intertwined with the fruits of rigorous studio sessions with producer Ethan P. Flynn.
Lyrically Murphy conjures images inspired by everything from Ancient Roman hand-binding torture to a Fred and Ginger tap routine. A deep sense of longing and echoes of lost, distant memory haunt the record.
On the album, the artist says she wanted “the listener to feel
disoriented, erotically charged by the intimacy of a bedroom, then catapulted into a desert.”
released June 14th, 2024
Produced by Martha Skye Murphy & Ethan P. Flynn
The Fat Angel Sings 