On the morning of April 3, 2011, James Murphy rolled over, reached for his phone, saw he had 50 voicemails, and burrowed back under the covers with his dog. After a while, he pulled on a pair of plaid pajama bottoms and took the dog out for a walk. Murphy didn’t have anywhere to be. As he deadpans in Shut Up and Play the Hits, the documentary chronicling LCD Soundsystem’s farewell concert on April 2, he was “retired.”
Of course, no one really believed that Murphy had actually retired, at just 41 and coming off one of the most beloved indie bands of his generation. Music is change, so it was assumed that Murphy would launch new outfits and tackle different endeavors. And he did, kind of, bouncing from project to project, restless as the cowbell on “Disco Infiltrator.”
Lucky for us, Murphy turned out to be a shitty quitter. In December 2015, just two months after declaring that they were definitely not reuniting, it was confirmed that LCD Soundsystem would play Coachella 2016. From there, they hit the ground running: signing to Columbia, playing more reunion shows, playing some regular ol’ no-longer-a-reunion shows, playing a five-night run in Brooklyn, playing “SNL,” and, finally, releasing the excellent “double A side” single“Call the Police” / “American Dream.”
While we await the forthcoming album, which Murphy swears is “seriously almost done,” here’s a timeline of Murphy’s whereabouts in between that fateful balloon drop and his decision to get the band back together.
January 2012: Murphy appears in Rick Alverson’s brutal film The Comedy as Ken, the scruffy sidekick of Tim Heidecker’s trust-fund brat Swanson. Accompanied by the equally obnoxious Eric Wareheim and Gregg Turkington (aka Neil Hamburger), Murphy is the very picture of mute ambivalence as he flashes the disaffected-hipster equivalent of the Mona Lisa smile, wherein irony and boredom pool in the great yawning void where the soul used to be. That is to say: He’s pretty good!
July 2012: Murphy announces his plans to open House of Good, his “personal store,” where he’ll sell things like Chinese sneakers, Danish candy, and socks. That admittedly vague list of sweets and footwear is, at least, an improvement upon the business plan he has shared with Pitchfork five months earlier, for “a store that sells stuff.”
April 2013: Murphy produces “Buried Alive” for Yeah Yeah Yeahs, fellow veterans of New York’s early-’00s dance-punk scene. Murphy’s uncharacteristically atmospheric touch can’t keep them from sounding unfocused, and neither does a meandering guest verse from Dr. Octagon.
Summer 2013: Along with David and Stephen Dewaele of Soulwax/2ManyDJs, Murphy creates Despacio, a traveling dance club renowned for its pristine sound, which the trio brings to festivals worldwide. With eight 11-foot-tall McIntosh speaker stacks arranged in the round, the immersive setup also sees the DJs playing at ground level, invisible to nearly all—an elegant way of escaping the pedestal of fame, upon which Murphy has never seemed entirely comfortable. The name Despacio, which translates to “slow,” is a nod to the trio’s fondness for pitching down their favorite space disco and yacht rock until the sound becomes gelatinous. But it also speaks to how ridiculously expensive and inefficient the undertaking is: To get the sound system to U.S. gigs, it must go by boat.
October 2013: Murphy writes music for director Mike Nichols’ stage production of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, starring Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz, and Rafe Spall. “Because I make music for myself, when I get to make music to accompany a play I have a job,” he tells WNYC. “It's similar to the job that I hope someone would do for me for a record cover of mine. I'm going to put myself in it as much as I can, but it's not for me.”
October 2013: Arcade Fire releases fourth album Reflektor, co-produced by former tourmate Murphy and brimming with dance muscle, disco crescendos, and palpable anxiety. With Win Butler offering on-record assessments like, “Do you like rock’n’roll music? ‘Cuz I don’t know if I do,” they couldn’t have picked a better collaborator than Murphy, a former punk who turned his back on rock for dance music.
October 2013: Murphy delivers a 10-plus-minute remix of David Bowie’s “Love Is Lost” that channels space disco via Steve Reich’s “Clapping Music.” He turns out to be the perfect remixer, and not just for his obvious sonic debt to Bowie. The song’s opening lines—“It’s the darkest hour, you’re 22/The voice of youth, the hour of dread”—are essentially a more harrowing take on the same disquietude that has gripped Murphy since “Losing My Edge.”
October 2013: Under the mentorship of Ron Howard, Murphy makes his directorial debut with Little Duck, a short film for Canon’s Project Imaginat10n. The brief sounds like the kind of thing only a marketing department could come up with: Users upload photographs to a website, Murphy and his fellow directors select 10 images and make a film inspired by them. Surprisingly, then, Murphy’s film—about a young Japanese man who returns home from Manhattan to deal with a family crisis—has a quiet, tentative character. Despite Murphy’s cinematic dabbling, it’s unclear whether he’ll stick with film. “I have an interest in everything, but I don’t have an interest in starting new careers,” he tells Stereogum of his film foray.
February 2014: A vocal coffee hound, Murphy has bigger plans than landing a barista job at his local Starbucks. He delivers on his obsession with a custom blend created with Oakland roasters Blue Bottle, called (but of course) House of Good. According to the company’s marketing materials, its flavor profile represents “a harmony between the voluptuous and the austere,” and includes dried cherry, cocoa, and Meyer lemon—although not, presumably, socks, Chinese sneakers, or Danish candy. (His shop, also to be called House of Good, has still not materialized.)
August 2014: Canon’s convoluted concept for Project Imaginat10n has got nothing on IBM’s campaign to tout their cloud computing services, in which Murphy and a crew of data scientists from the “visual storytelling” brand agency Tool convert real-time data from the 2014 U.S. Open into generative music. The results, uploaded to IBM’s SoundCloud page, often sound as abstruse as the methodology, in which a host of data points—players’ seeds, court temperature, game scores, aces, point breaks—determine variables like pitch and timbre. But Murphy’s resulting album, Remixes Made With Tennis Data, manages to turn hard-court randomness back into some pretty convincing disco.
March 2015: Murphy scores Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young, a comedy starring Ben Stiller, Naomi Watts, Amanda Seyfried, Adam Driver, and Beastie Boys’ Ad-Rock. It marks the second time he’s worked with the Brooklyn-born director, after 2010’s Greenberg. Together, the two soundtracks’ twinkling synth experiments and bedroom soul sketches offer a teasing glimpse of a rarely-seen side of Murphy, tinkering away on his synths in solitude—nary a beat in earshot.
June 2015: With his House of Good store still forthcoming, Murphy and his wife instead open a house of glug. Announced just a month before its opening, Williamsburg wine bar the Four Horsemen features hundreds of wines—including a whole section of the menu dedicated to orange wines—and a menu overseen by chef Nick Curtola. For what it’s worth, the Four Horsemen enjoys a five-star rating on Trip Advisor and four-and-a-half stars on Yelp. That’s better than LCD Soundsystem’s Metacritic ratings for Sound of Silver (86 Metascore / 8.5 User Score) and This Is Happening (84 Metascore / 8.5 User Score). There’s no doubting Murphy’s done research: In the years leading up to the Four Horsemen’s launch, he tells the New York Times that he’s eaten so much rich food, he developed gout.
June 2015: After a decade-plus of dreaming about turning subway turnstiles into musical instruments—“I want to make every station in New York have a different set of dominant keys,” he said, “so that people who grow up will later on in life hear a piece of music and say, ‘Oh, that's like Union Square’”—Murphy finally teams up with Heineken on a plan to realize his sonic vision. In a press release, he explains, “New York City is a beautiful, one-of-a-kind place, and the people who are willing to do what it takes to live here—deal with the crowds and the commotion and the noise—deserve a little sonic gift like this. I want to turn the cacophony of the subway into unique pieces of music.” The MTA, unfortunately responds by saying, essentially, Yeah, when hell freezes over. “We have heard from him, and as we've told him many times, we cannot do it,” the agency tells Gothamist, sounding more like an exasperated parent than a government bureaucracy. Cue up “New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down.”
July 2016: Rebuffed by the MTA, Murphy and Heineken install their subway project in the Lowline, a subterranean park on New York’s Lower East Side. The timing couldn’t be more ironic: Six months after announcing LCD Soundsystem’s Coachella reunion shows, and five months after signing to Columbia, Murphy finally conquers the underground.