If you listened to LCD Soundsystem’s “New York, I Love You, “Daft Punk is Playing at My House” and “Dance Yrself Clean” in succession, you may not think you’re listening to three tracks all from the same artist. One is a piano ballad with soft-spoken vocals, another is an energy-fueled, albeit repetitive, dance track, and the last is an airy, introspective mix of Vampire Weekend and Grizzly Bear.
The third track above is the opening song on dance-punk group LCD Soundsystem’s third album, This is Happening, set to come out May 18th on lead singer and instrumentalist James Murphy’s co-founded label DFA Records.
While the album won’t drop for another month, This is Happening has been streaming on their official website as of April 14, allowing fans to hear all the album’s tracks in their entirety before they’re released.
As someone who had already written LCD Soundsystem off as a one-note group solely suited for dance party playlists, I found myself simultaneously impressed by Murphy’s lyrics and literally unable to stop bobbing my head.
“Dance Yrself Clean,” starts off mellow enough, with simple drumbeats and a chorus consisting mostly of “ahhhhh’s,” but a few minutes in, the synthesizer starts up and you realize that it’s still LCD Soundsystem after all. Never claiming to be an astute lyricist, Murphy seems to be stretching his pen and paper skills with lines like, “love is an astronaut, it comes back, but it’s never the same,” from “Drunk Girls'” and “if you’re afraid of what you need, look around you, you’re surrounded, it won’t get any better,” from the album’s final track, ‘Home.’
These, however, serve best at balancing out synth-fueled, borderline ridiculous tracks like “Pow Pow,” where Murphy talks over an infectious beat that Dan Le Sac or The Streets would probably fancy. “I Can Change” takes us through a journey of repeating “Never change, never change,” that eventually switches to “I can change, I can change, if it helps you fall in love.”
There is a directness in Murphy’s words that makes them very relatable. Or at least that’s how I felt when I heard him exclaim, “Drunk girls are boringly wild,” and replied “I KNOW, RIGHT?” It’s simple, and it works. I am hesitant only toward Murphy’s proclamation of “You wanted a hit, but that’s not what we do,” from the sixth track, because once the album officially comes out, I think LCD Soundsystem may find they underestimated themselves.
Whether sincere or silly, each song fits together to form a cohesive album that uses the same formula LCD Soundsystem has successfully employed in the past: simple, steady beats that are all catchy as hell. The lyrics stand out but don’t overshadow the group’s signature finely crafted beats, and if it does turn out to be the last LCD Soundsystem album (as it has been rumored), then it’s safe to say that they went out in a blaze of head-bobbing glory.
