"I didn’t become a pop star, and nobody knows exactly why," said Róisín Murphy of her last full-length album, 2007’s Overpowered. In retrospect, it’s shocking everyone didn’t immediately grasp exactly why. Never mind the talk of career repositioning and the Super Glue-sticky singles and the high-fashion diva-ing—Overpowered may not have been immediate, but it was classic in its own way, and prescient. There’s no shortage of people dissecting her influence on other artists’ gonzo fashion, and many artists are now making dancefloor tracks that embrace house piano and disco tropes, even if they’d fizzle and die if held up next to "Let Me Know". But given the modern dance revival’s rigid stratification of artists into shrugged-away female vocalists and celebrated male producer-celebrities, perhaps it’s for the best that Murphy has shied away from trends, and with a few exceptions, mostly foregone guest spots.
Indeed, Murphy’s output over the past near-decade has been wildly unpredictable, ranging from dance bangers with porno guitars ("Orally Fixated") to an Édith Piaf-inspired EP of Italian art songs not to mention two remix EPs that might have stirred the highest of emotions on the dancefloor, if only people heard them. And Hairless Toys continues this trend. It’s the most cerebral work of Murphy’s decades-long career, and arguably the one with her most creative control yet, letting listeners closer into her head than ever yet keeping them at a distance even there.
The album comes with a few preconceptions. "Gone Fishing" was inspired by the New York ball scene, which, coming from a white Irish woman well after ball culture returned to the mainstream, has the potential to get dicey fast. And Murphy’s rationale for the record—"I envisioned ‘Gone Fishing’ almost as a song from a Broadway musical version of [iconic documentary Paris Is Burning]"—is not so far from Madonna co-opting vogueing into a machine to make herself endless context-free royalties. But "Gone Fishing" is less sonic homage, more earnest expression of empathy. And if Hairless Toys takes anything from that world it’s the subtext: it’s largely an album about confronting one’s failures and anxieties and outsider feelings and mythologizing them.
Sometimes others are invited in. "Exploitation" is nine-and-a-half minutes of circling closer and closer around one obsessive question: "Who’s exploiting who?" The sexual overtones are there if you’re looking for them, the sociological analogies almost make themselves: artists exploiting subjects, or vice versa. But that’s all overly serious for a track this deliberately whimsical: polyrhythms, a cartoon cliff-dive of a guitar riff after the lyric "the depths that they will go," fax-machine noises—all fascinating sounds, manipulated one after the other to make you think they mean something.
"Exploitation" is also the most traditional single on an album mostly concerned with inner pain. "Uninvited Guest" is more typical, describing a quite specific emotional state: the near-agoraphobic inertia—total inactivity from the outside, a deafening restless twitch on the inside—that comes of anxiety and having enough money to stay there forever: "I could get out of my head/ Even all the money I have left, I could buy another day of nothing." The music’s somewhere between synesthesia of the mood and a dark joke at its own expense: hi-hat tremors, backing vocals elbowing through the mix, a bridge to lose time in, a helpless shrug of a whistling line. (Murphy, like just about everyone who shares a genre and gender, has fought off Kate Bush comparisons, and continues to do so; but "Guest", in topic and particularly in its wry gallows humor, is much like an introvert’s "Sat in Your Lap".)
"Exile" is a torch song delivered in a wearied whisper, every note heard through smoke, evoking less the dance floor than a bar that’s 2 a.m. empty. "Unputdownable" is a traditional Murphy extended metaphor—lover as page-turning book—with a mid-track swerve that reveals it not as a love song but something less requited, more unknowable: "I’d open up the book and climb right up out of the town...if you’d allow me to read your mind." (Like much of Hairless Toys, it almost seems like a comment on the record as well.)
It’s heady stuff, but the album’s emotional landscape is sketched so distinctly there’s ample reason to stick with it. There’s also, three-fourths through, a musical payoff. "House of Glass" delivers grand statements, often set stark against the music as if underlined in fire: "We were glass house girls in our plastic wigs and pearls"; "People like us from broken homes never throw stones"; "Little pieces of a broken dream"; "Built a house of glass out of fragments from the blast." Fittingly, it also builds up to the album’s centerpiece: the chords from "Exploitation", the ascending peals from "Gone Fishing", disco guitar licks and swarming background vocals assembled into a fragile yet stunning climax. It’s all gleaming and immaculate from a distance, sharp and shattered if you get too close.
