Even before the events of the last fortnight, Róisín Murphy’s sixth album teetered on the edge of danger. Preoccupied with unrequited desire, Hit Parade lurches recklessly between soulful rhapsodies about getting what you want and shadowy techno tracing the allure of self-sabotage, and innately understands that these apparently conflicting states are two sides of exactly the same coin. They’re united further by Murphy’s cosmic worldview, which perceives desire as a kind of fate, and the playfulness of producer DJ Koze, AKA Stefan Kozalla, who lavishes the record with iridescent detail, as if zooming in on dew drops in the fur of a golden labrador or delighting in the twitching aliveness of a luscious jungle.
Hit Parade has been a very long time coming: it was made over six years, mostly remotely, and finished two years ago. Murphy has said that she would send her parts to the German producer, who would twist them to his whimsical but perfectionist ear, often sending back total surprise reinventions of songs they had already worked on intensively: flipping country soul to skeletal post-dubstep, unexpectedly splicing in voicemails from Murphy and clips from her goofy in-character bits on TikTok. In every sense, textual and meta, Hit Parade considers what the truest expression of a feeling might be.
