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.”
