Album Review: Chet Faker, A Love For Strangers

Nick Murphy is nomadic in more ways than one. Not only does he opt to live in a different place for each album cycle (his latest was written and recorded across New York and Tucson), but he also wavers between who he releases music as, returning to the Chet Faker alias in 2021 after a spell under his given name.

That’s not an indication of a lack of authenticity or self-examination. By the halfway point on A Love For Strangers a theme emerges: this is a record that turns inward to reflect on loss. Within this emotional framing, Murphy ponders second chances (‘This Time For Real’), yearning to desperate lengths (‘Far Side of the Moon’), and drowning under the tidal wave of love (‘Can You Swim?’).

His voice is impressive as always: a wistful blend of falsetto and soulful crooning that delivers songs with a raw, unassuming quality, as if he were messing around on the piano at home and a friend on the couch hit record without him noticing. Murphy is a seasoned engineer of R&B-flavoured electro-pop by now, and the record blends warbling synthscapes, breakbeats, field recordings and other embellishments over a backbone of bass, piano and guitar. It sounds intimate, detailed and widescreen all at once.

The album occasionally buckles under lyrical cliché. ‘The Thing About Nothing’, while sweet and sincere, reaches for the ‘nothing will come of nothing’ idea - already an ageing axiom by the time Shakespeare used it. In the same song, Murphy and collaborator aLex vs aLex ask to be ‘taken to the river’, presumably to be baptised and absolved for using such a tired Soul trope.

The album closes with more religious referencing on ‘Just My Hallelujah’, which has a chorus that sits in interesting tension with the decaying relationship described in the verses. Whether that hallelujah is prayer, irony or relief, is hard to say.

What’s easier to deduce is that A Love For Strangers is expertly produced, and that Nick Murphy (or Chet Faker) has reemerged as a mature songwriter capable of introspection without affectation.

• A Love For Strangers is out now.