LCD Soundsystem’s career ended quite magically, in 2011, with a concert at Madison Square Garden. At the end of the night, after an almost decade-long run during which the group changed what both dance music and rock bands could do, balloons fell from the ceiling, strangers hugged one another, and devoted fans cried. The next year, a documentary, “Shut Up and Play the Hits,” captured the concert’s staging and immediate aftermath, and also James Murphy, the group’s sole full-time member, having long, thoughtful conversations about the musical legacy he was leaving behind. In 2014, a lavish boxed set arrived to further commemorate that glorious last hurrah. Murphy, who is now forty-seven, retired to a life of seeming leisure, opening a wine bar, roasting coffee beans, and indulging in one-off, prestige musical experiments involving the U.S. Open and the New York City subways.
When Murphy announced, in January, 2016, that he and his principal collaborators, the keyboardist Nancy Whang and the percussionist Pat Mahoney, would reunite, many fans were excited but unsurprised, presuming that they had simply decided to cash in on their legacy—it was the kind of jaded response that had been conditioned by the group’s knowing, punkish music. But there were some people for whom the band, whose anthems about getting older and feeling younger had served as benchmarks for personal growth, belonged in the past.
A lifetime of collecting and arguing about music had served Murphy well in his previous career as a sound engineer, in the nineties. But it also meant that he was bruising and snobbish in his estimations of what was good and what wasn’t. In the early two-thousands, after an epiphany about the glories of dancing—it involved the drug ecstasy—he began working as a producer, and co-founded the label DFA. The music that DFA put out was a thrillingly promiscuous fusion of post-punk’s wiry intensity, the spacey expanse of German experimental rock, and dance music’s call to transcendence.
LCD Soundsystem started as a bit of a joke. Murphy wasn’t a particularly strong singer, his vocal range initially landing somewhere between talking and hectoring. The band’s first hit was “Losing My Edge,” in 2002, a play-by-play commentary in which Murphy, the consummate aging hipster, realizes his own obsolescence. But it captured an idea about coolness, taste, and mastery which, in retrospect, was on its last legs.
Murphy had peculiar, wide-ranging tastes at a time when amassing a huge, eclectic record collection indicated a compulsive, cooler-than-thou personality. But he also understood that putting together unlikely things could produce interesting emotional friction. He tinkered with dance music’s maximalist tendencies, pairing huge, community-moving beats with introspective, almost twee lyrics. And his intense, theatrical sense of self-awareness short-circuited criticisms that his music was unoriginal—that seemed to be the point.
Being older means that you have a longer list of old highs to chase, if you have the energy to do so. What Murphy mastered in the course of LCD Soundsystem’s first three albums was how to convey the sensations and the feelings of aging without sounding tired. He was suggesting an emotional grammar without ever clearly employing it. His songs offered glimpses of drifting apart and letting go, of feeling love and being loved, but rarely more than just glimpses. There was always an incompleteness that felt meaningful. I have spent seasons chasing the thrills of LCD Soundsystem anthems—especially “All My Friends,” a 2007 hit built on soul-searching and on galloping pianos—despite understanding only about half of the lyrics.
“American Dream,” the new LCD Soundsystem album, begins with “Oh Baby,” a luscious, gliding synth-pop gem that manages to feel cavernous yet tender. “Tonite” is a funny, self-referential dance-floor anthem about dance-floor anthems. “Everybody’s singing the same song / It goes Tonite (tonight tonight tonight tonight tonight) / I never realized that these artists thought so much about dying.” It’s a playful stab at those who live purely for the moment—might the fear of missing out merely reveal our death drive? Murphy pops up, in a muffled interlude, as a “hobbled veteran of the disk-shop inquisition,” a reminder that “you’re getting older—I promise you this.” Why not just enjoy it?
Murphy’s self-consciousness has always kept his songs from saying too much, when intimation or innuendo will do. On “How Do You Sleep?” he shames a onetime friend, recalling the days when they laughed, fought, and talked about the dangers of doing all that cocaine. Despite his howling vocals and a grim, almost vengefully heavy synth line, it has some funny moments: “Standing on the shore getting old / You left me here with the vape clowns.” The song might be interpreted as a revenge tune directed at Tim Goldsworthy, who co-founded DFA, and from whom Murphy is now estranged.
Earlier this year, the journalist Lizzy Goodman published “Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011,” an oral history centered on bands such as the Strokes, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, and LCD Soundsystem. It’s odd to read a memorial to a period that ended so recently. But, as nearly everyone Goodman interviews says, there was once a time when people had to telephone one another in order to make plans, an era when cabs didn’t fancy going to Brooklyn, and—in the case of New York City’s arbitrarily enforced “cabaret laws,” which require licenses for people to dance—a time, during Rudolph Giuliani’s administration, when bars feared being shut down if a few people were swaying in unison.
The book is broadly about making it in the city and conjuring a scene you want to be a part of. But it also addresses precocity—how it’s possible for success to come too fast. This certainly wasn’t a problem for Murphy, who spent his twenties playing in fairly generic indie-rock bands. By the early aughts, he was bored and jaded because he had already tried and failed; he was well down the path of plan B, the less glamorous life of recording other people’s music. But then Murphy somehow managed to turn a seemingly unmarketable archetype—the studio nerd, chatty purist, and well-fed dad telling his kid he’s heard it all before—into an act that could headline festivals. Rock traditions finally unravelled, and Murphy became the new establishment.
When LCD Soundsystem released the title track of “American Dream” as a single, I thought it was a gorgeous, misty, synth-pop waltz that didn’t really go anywhere. (I also thought it was a curious title for a time like now.) But I found myself humming certain lines over and over: “Look what happened when you were dreaming / And then punch yourself in the face.” As always, Murphy’s flat, disaffected style of singing gives the impression that he’s above it all, not quite disassociating but capable of floating free from the scene.
There’s a heaviness to the new album. Many of the songs feel more traditionally rock driven than LCD Soundsystem’s earlier work, and few of them hit their peaks. There are still bursts of old-versus-young frivolity, as Murphy giggles at “these bullying children of the fabulous / raffling off limited-edition shoes.” But the most significant losses lamented on “American Dream” aren’t about a bygone hipness or the diminishing power of morning-after vitality. The album ends with “Black Screen”: at first, it’s just a slow pulse, then analog synths enter, sounding as if they’re interpreting a gentle breeze. “Couldn’t make our wedding day / Too sick to travel / You fell between a friend and a father,” Murphy sings, quietly and flatly. A lot of the song’s details echo stories Murphy has been sharing about his friendship with David Bowie. Murphy said in an interview that he had been invited to co-produce Bowie’s final album, “Blackstar,” but he felt overwhelmed. “I had fear in the room,” he sings. “So I stopped turning up.” By song’s end, he’s combing old e-mail threads, laughing at shared jokes, staring at an image of the cosmos—“You could be anywhere on the black screen.” Previous metrics for personal change begin to seem quaint. Friendships have been mended, accounts settled. But now it’s a far different scale of yearning, as the pillars around Murphy disappear. ♦
