Republic of the Weird is the second album from Cursed Murphy Versus the Resistance, the eight-piece ensemble based in Wexford, Ireland, led by writer and musician Peter Murphy. It’s the follow-up to their hugely acclaimed eponymous debut, released in 2020.
The new album’s ten 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 Johnny 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 synthesizers, multi-tracked violin and choral parts alongside the band’s trademark noise guitar and propulsive rhythms. Thematically, the 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 on October 21, plus an accompanying video. Cursed Murphy Versus the Resistance play a hometown album launch show at The Crown Live, Wexford, November 5th, the closing night of the Fringe Festival.
