Nick Murphy was once the bedroom musician Chet Faker. In 2011, his sullen, downtempo cover of Blackstreet’s classic ’90s R&B jam “No Diggity” rocketed to the top of the Hype Machine chart, the peak of virality in the age of MP3 blogs. His instantaneous ascent portended bigger genre trends in the coming half-decade: In the early 2010s, “chill” indie electronica was emerging as a form of resistance against the hyper-manic EDM boom. Brooding auteurs like How to Dress Well and Rhye bubbled up with ambient, trip-hoppy alternative R&B. Chet Faker was an Australian dude with a beard who belonged to both the burgeoning worlds of Majestic Casual-core and white dudes singing soul music. He could make an EP with Flume, then turn around and record stripped-down covers of Burial on the Rhodes.
But Murphy thought the Faker vibe was unsustainable. Two years after releasing his only album under the moniker, 2014’s Built on Glass, Murphy solemnly announced that he was retiring it. “There's an evolution happening and I wanted to let you know where it's going,” he wrote on Facebook, promising that his next album would be released as Nick Murphy. In the time leading up to his real, not-fake debut, he set out on a quest to figure out himself and the next chapter of his musical career. He began working in studios instead of in his bedroom. He teamed up with Darkside guitar wizard Dave Harrington. He read Joseph Campbell’s theories of the artist as a modern shaman. On some Jack Kerouac shit, he traveled the world with a microphone, recording vocal takes when he felt like it. But after all of that soul-searching, the resulting album, Run Fast Sleep Naked, gives no indication that Nick Murphy knows who Nick Murphy actually is.
Run Fast Sleep Naked is at once overstuffed and underwhelming. The instrumental choices on “Sanity” are wildly unfocused, as Justice-style power synths and gospel background vocals compete with the clunky blues piano and bongo drumming of an already cluttered song. The grating, distorted strings of “Harry Takes Drugs on the Weekend” seem to purposefully resemble two pieces of sheet metal rubbed together, as if feigning innovation through unconventional sound design. The album aims for the punky orchestral spirit of Mitski’s Puberty 2, but ends up sounding like Jack White’s Boarding House Reach: a rock-adjacent Christian-blues slog that won’t live its best life until it’s cut down to a 15-second snippet in a Subaru commercial.
Ambitious production can’t quite cover the fact that none of the songs on Run Fast Sleep Naked have a conceptual core. On “Novacaine and Coca Cola,” Murphy borrows buzzwords that Frank Ocean and Lana Del Rey played with almost a decade ago, but never quite builds a cohesive storyline around the hedonistic signifers. Much of the album finds him chanting empty phrases like, “Guess I’m losing my mind,” and “Not night in the light, in the light, in the light.” You get that Murphy is confused, searching for some form of clarity. But because he never pinpoints the source of his internal battle or the details of his journey, the result is a swamp of abstraction.
Speaking on Zane Lowe’s Beats 1 radio show recently, Murphy explained that the process of creating the record wasn’t necessarily about the music itself. “I kept doing my work as an artist to grab the music when it was falling out. The work for me was really working on my life and myself,” he said. “You travel around the world at 22, you’re a kid. It’s awesome, but you miss all the time to figure out the real stuff, the spiritual stuff.” Considering the massive incoherence of Run Fast Sleep Naked, it’s hard to say what “real stuff” Murphy has figured out. Maybe he should have put a little more work into the music.
