Cursed Murphy Versus the Resistance to launch new album in Wexford next month

Wexford outfit Cursed Murphy Versus the Resistance are set to release their second album, Republic of the Weird on November 4th, 2022.

The eight-piece ensemble have today announced a launch for the forthcoming album at The Crown Live, Wexford on November 5th.

Cursed Murphy Versus the Resistance is led by writer and musician Peter Murphy, with the band releasing their acclaimed eponymous debut LP back in 2020. The distinctive act 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.

Earlier this year, Cursed Murphy... 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.

Republic of the Weird's 10 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 Fox 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 synthesisers, multi-tracked violin and choral parts alongside the band’s trademark noise guitar and propulsive rhythms.

Thematically, the new album's 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 this Friday, October 21, plus an accompanying video.