Album release date: Nov 4
Title track available for streaming and download: Oct 21
Launch show The Crown Live, Wexford: Nov 5
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Republic of the Weird is the second album from Cursed Murphy Versus the Resistance, the eight-piece ensemble based in Wexford, Ireland, led by writer and musician Peter Murphy. It’s the follow-up to their hugely acclaimed eponymous debut, released in 2020.
The new album’s ten tracks were co-produced by Peter, Dan Comerford and Johnny Fox, written throughout 2020 and 2021, and recorded in Rosslare Strand last autumn, shortly after the band’s sojourn with the Culture Ireland-supported Here/There art exhibition to Wuppertal and Berlin. The album was mixed by Johnny the following spring, with additional production and co-writing by Kilmore duo Basciville on ‘This Is Not Your Love Song’, an industrial-disco banger somewhere between Leonard Cohen and Nine Inch Nails.
If Cursed Murphy Versus the Resistance was a head-on collision between post-punk, performance-poetry and ambient atmospheres, this new album integrates orchestral elements, using analogue synthesizers, multi-tracked violin and choral parts alongside the band’s trademark noise guitar and propulsive rhythms. Thematically, the tracks range from sinister carnival calls (‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’) to eruptions of anger and compassion (‘Hold That Line’), existential bewilderment (the title track), songs of lost love (‘The Agony of the Leaves’), trauma and war (‘Upon That Hill’, ‘Federal Hall’).
“Republic of the Weird refers to the state we’ve been living in for the past five or six years,” Peter says. “It’s about what happens when a generation of people who grew up on punk and electronic music, on dark sci-fi and speculative books and films, wake up one day to realise that their world has started to look like a present-day dystopia. But the feeling is strangely hopeful and inspiring too. We’re proud of the sound and the spirit of this record. It’s an album about future shock, but also hope and resilience.”
Republic of the Weird will be preceded by the title track’s release for streaming and download on October 21, plus an accompanying video. Cursed Murphy Versus the Resistance play a hometown album launch show at The Crown Live, Wexford, November 5th, the closing night of the Fringe Festival.
Cursed Murphy Versus the Resistance emerged in 2018 as a mashup of post-punk, German electronic music, spoken word, industrial music, big beats, sci-fi film soundtracks, Brazilian rhythms and Brechtian punk. The band released their eponymous debut album, which contained the singles ‘Foxhole Prayer’, ‘The Bells of Hell’ and ‘Climb’, in July 2020. It received stunning reviews from the Irish Times, RTE, Hot Press and the Sunday Times among other publications, as well as national airplay from Paul McLoone, Dan Hegarty, The John Creedon Show, Late Date and Arena.
The album also generated huge acclaim internationally, featuring on the Global Garage radio show, the Big Slice (UK) and in the French mag Muzzart, with fan testimonials coming from Sweden, Australia, South Africa, Hong Kong and the US. It was voted No. 2 album of the year by readers of The Last Mixed Tape, and No. 1 album of the year by Mike’s Music Express on Dundalk FM.
In September 2021 the collective embarked on a German mini-tour, playing Wuppertal and Berlin as part of the travelling Here/There exhibition, supported by Culture Ireland. Earlier this year they played a sold-out show in Wexford Opera House with guests Basciville and poet Stephen James Smith, with whom Peter recorded a collaborative EP, Tell It to A Tree, released last December.
