Roisin Murphy is a pop star for the art house cinema set. Her third solo album departs from the steady stream of banging club singles she’s released in the years since 2007’s Overpowered, and its brightly coloured homage to New York at the height of the disco era, to delve deeper into dance history for inspiration.
On Hairless Toys, she fuses delicate, slow-burning deep-house-type rhythms with pop twang and the odd bit of glittering glam. Mirroring the music’s restraint, the lyrics occasionally veer into typical romantic love pop fare, but Murphy seems intent on avoiding the predictable route, instead looking at other forms of love while revelling in cerebral grandeur and then hitting listeners with a simple, direct melody.
Opener Gone Fishing nods to queer “family-ness” and the documentary Paris Is Burning, Unputdownable celebrates the solitary joys of reading, and Exploitation muses on the tension between art and commerce. It’s never clear where these songs are going, but the result always satisfies.
Top track: Unputdownable
