LCD Soundsystem‘s James Murphy was interviewed at length in New York Magazine. He discussed the band’s upcoming comeback album American Dream, what he did during the band’s time off, and how he looks back on his previous work and that of his ’00s-NYC-bred contemporaries. Does he regret saying the band was splitting up for good in 2011? Almost certainly.
“For the rest of my life, now matter what happens in this band, we’ll never ‘break up’ again. One day we’ll just stop making music, but no one is going to say a fucking word about it ahead of time,” he told interviewer David Marchese.
Murphy also spoke about why he believed his generation of New York City bands was an authentic, meaningful scene, despite characterizations to the contrary at the time:
There’s always a good way to tell how much special shit was really going on at a given time, and that’s by how many bands self-destructed. Because if there’s nothing special going on, bands don’t self-destruct, they just break up and everyone goes and gets a day job. Lots of ‘90s bands didn’t self-destruct; guys in indie bands just stopped being guys in indie bands because what they were doing didn’t matter — they didn’t freak out and ruin themselves. Instead after awhile they just were like, “You know, I don’t want to do this.” But a lot of the early-2000s-period bands went super weird and freaked out. The Liars completely changed direction. The Strokes kind of self-destructed. The Rapture kind of self-destructed. That’s a good sign to me that something interesting was going on.
Murphy also discussed his side hustle as a wine bar owner in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and espresso curator, saying that his 20-year-old self would want to “punch the today-me in the balls…My 47-year-old self wants to punch me in the balls sometimes.” He also espoused his admiration for one of the great artworks of the 20th century, The Roches’ “Hammond Song”: “I played it on vinyl in my house and wept uncontrollably…it was one of the most visceral experiences of a song that I’ve ever had.”
Read the first interview here. American Dream is out September 1.
