In 2002, against the advice of his friends, a 34-year-old James Murphy released "Losing My Edge," an eight-minute track with a simple, slow-building drum machine pattern. On it, Murphy humorously questions his relevance: "But I'm losing my edge to better-looking people with better ideas and more talent/ And they're actually really, really nice."
The track would, somewhat ironically, make Murphy's LCD Soundsystem and his burgeoning Brooklyn indie label DFA Records the cool new kids on the block.
Murphy started getting booked off of the song and decided to put an actual band behind LCD Soundsystem, calling on Nancy Whang (synths, keys and vocals) and Pat Mahoney (drums and drum machines). Two years later, bassist Tyler Pope became a core member; stellar musicians from the punk/indie/art rock world would join them in the studio and/or on tour over the years.
In January 2005, LCD Soundsystem released their eponymous two-disc debut album, which opens with one of their beloved classics "Daft Punk Is Playing at My House," a No. 1 hit on the UK Dance chart. The aforementioned track and album also earned them their first two GRAMMY nominations in 2006, for Best Electronic/Dance Album and Best Dance Recording respectively, and the album reached No. 6 on Billboard's Top Dance/Electronic Album chart in March 2005. Murphy and company hadn't lost their edge — rather, they were certified big-time indie stars.
Twenty-one years after their tongue-in-cheek debut and 12 years after their not-so-final farewell shows at Madison Square Garden, the beloved Brooklyn band is back with their third residency on their home turf, this time with twelve shows across three New York City venues: Brooklyn Steel (where they had their 2021 and 2022 residencies), Terminal 5 in Manhattan and Knockdown Center in Queens. The shows sold out in a matter of seconds and saw high resale prices clocking double to triple face value, just as their "final" show at Madison Square Garden did in 2011.
In the midst of their highly anticipated Tri Boro Tour — which wraps Dec. 10 — GRAMMY.com examines why LCD Soundsystem still resonates so strongly, even as the dance music and indie scenes around them have changed so much.
They're Y2K's Answer To The Talking Heads
LCD Soundsystem was born during the early aughts, their punk DIY ethos part of New York's brief but thriving indie rock scene (led by the popularity of the Strokes). As documented in Lizzy Goodman's 2017 book, Meet Me in the Bathroom, Murphy fell in love with dance music after trying ecstasy on a New York dance floor, promptly expanding his sonic world.
After this blissful experience, he finally felt comfortable dancing. He started DJing his favorite deep-cut records and throwing parties with DFA co-founder Tim Goldsworthy.
With LCD Soundsystem, he brought garage and indie rock to the rave, mixing the euphoria and energy of disco, acid house, and electronic instrumentation with guitars and snarky, self-deprecating lyrics. Their influences — ESG, Loose Joints, David Bowie, Talking Heads, CAN, Daft Punk, Kraftwerk — were spiritually present but seamlessly mixed in. Chopped up and flipped until a whole new thing was born, LCD's sound was as inventive as the house music and hip-hop producers and DJs that came before him.
"For many overstimulated and underwhelmed New York hipsters, LCD Soundsystem provided the soundtrack for making sense of the late 2000s," Ryan Pinkard wrote for Tidal. "LCD was to 2000s New York what the Velvet Underground and the Talking Heads were in their own eras. And their legacy is no less hefty nor contentious."
While music labels and outlets became obsessed with finding "the next Strokes," LCD and DFA paved their own path in indie dance. They made significant contributions to the era of loud, chaotic danceable music largely made by bands or DJs' edits of bands, which would later be coined bloghouse or indie sleaze. The Rapture's 2002 single "House of Jealous Lovers" and subsequent debut album, Echoes, were produced by Murphy and Goldsworthy. It brought the post-punk band into a dancier arena that proved successful for them and DFA.
Like the Talking Heads — who, 30 years prior, made music "abuzz with nervous energy… [that] articulated the strangeness and anxiety of modern times" — LCD Soundsystem created artsy, humorous, danceable punk for the people, with an open-minded yet meticulously crafted DIY ethos.
Yet Murphy was a reluctant king of the indie dance scene. His own insecurities, perfectionism and jadedness around the scene and his own creative output resonated with his fans. He became — and remains — the moody, accidently cool Gen X father of his younger Gen X and older millennial fans; the younger generations are slowly catching up.
The Music — Lyrically and Sonically — Still Resonates
"It still kinda weighs on me a bit because we keep getting better and better at playing it live. It's surprising how long 'Losing My Edge' lingers around, for a dance song. But everyone's silly and shallow and insipid and vain and the more they accept it the less boring records we'll have," Murphy said of the ongoing popularity of "Losing My Edge."
"I made 'Yeah', which pretty much consists of me saying yeah over and over, to try and erase the expectation that it was gonna be another clever diatribe of lyrics. Etched into the vinyl of 'Yeah' is, 'Not as good as Losing My Edge.'"
The theme of relevancy and aging out youth culture is as old as time. "Losing My Edge" is an anthem for aging DJs and music fans, who are loyal to their scene but no longer at the center of it. With his debut track, Murphy is knocking too-cool-for-school hipsters, but most of all, he's knocking himself — the music video is a close up of him getting repeatedly smacked as he says the lyrics with a straight face.
It is this playful self-depreciation and jaded introspection that permeates Murphy's lyrics — often sing-spoken, sometimes shouted — makes them so relatable. Just as Murphy found catharsis during his first experience with ecstasy, LCD's upbeat music and contemplative lyrics provide a similar energy for the band's loyal fans.
And as guitars gave way for perfectly programmed EDM-level drops at the end of the 2000s, LCD's music was a necessary balm. The group united emo rave kids and moody guitar heads under the disco ball, creating a cathartic dance party. Here, celebrating, crying, shouting and dancing like a weirdo are all okay, because Murphy does it too.
"Someone Great," placed midway through their second album 2007's Sound of Silver, is a heart-wrenching meditation on grief, pierced by droning synths, sparkling bells and a tender-sounding Murphy. It's easy to place your own story in the song (I thought it was about an ex no longer in his life), which is about his therapist Dr. George Kamen, who died in 2006. The album is also dedicated to him.
Sound of Silver ends with another melancholic track, "New York, I Love You but You're Bringing Me Down," a slow-burning piano ballad that erupts into a can't-help-but-shout-along-chorus. It's a bittersweet love letter to the city that birthed the band (and that they still reside in), speaking to rapid gentrification and police crackdowns that pushed out (and continue to) creatives, venues and working-class people. Even when performed outside of NYC, the song feels poignant given the struggles of living in a capitalist society.
LCD Soundsystem's GRAMMY-nominated fourth studio album, american dream, was released in 2017, in Trump's dystopian America. The anxiety and discontentment are understandably still there, and Murphy is older, but no less disillusioned. "tonite" is a catchy GRAMMY-nominated acid house-tinged tune about all the songs on the radio declaring "you only live once, let's party!" Murphy's response is poetic: "I never realized these artists thought so much about dying/ But truth be told we all have the same end /Could make you cry, cry, cry, cry, cry."
The band has grown up (as have its core fanbase) but there are still plenty of feelings to be processed, sung out loud and danced out.
Their Sound Transcends Trends
LCD Soundsystem's first three albums were released during the first decade of the millennium and peak indie rock/bloghouse era, yet they don't feel dated. Instead, their music channeled something vintage without being nostalgic, and was incredibly fresh-sounding. They remain timeless and are among the era's standouts that still make great music and play killer shows, like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
Murphy famously attempted to dissolve the band at the peak of their fame in 2011 — a year after their release of their third album, This is Happening. He didn't want to become a band he hated, to keep getting bigger regardless of if their music was better or not. The hiatus lasted for four years.
"As things mature — whether they be real estate, rock 'n' roll, politics, festivals, radio — there's an efficiency that develops and with it, very often, comes some soul-crushing truths. If you keep doing it, you get bigger even if the records get worse," Murphy told the New York Times in 2017. "It was our turn, And something about that turned my stomach."
When Murphy was working on music that sounded like his beloved band, it seemed silly to not release it because he killed the project. The band's first — rather surprising — new song in five years, "christmas will break your heart," was released in December 2015. A much-hyped Coachella 2016 headline set, followed by a summer tour including other big fests like Lollapalooza, Primavera Sound and Glastonbury, meant LCD was very much back.
While some fans derided the band for making a big deal about breaking up and then coming back, they were clearly missed. And with their 2017 album, they've been able to avoid getting stuck in the nostalgia trap. Of course, LCD Soundsystem's latest tune, 2022's "new body rhumba," was created to close out the absurd grocery store dance scene in Noah Bambauch's White Noise (based on Don DeLillo's dystopian 1985 novel of the same name).
"There's a lot of music that came out in the '80s around the time of that book that I love," Murphy told Netflix about writing the song. "I didn't want to do anything that was sounding like '80s Radiohead… And I don't want to do emotions for emotions sake. Because I feel that life and death and fear and feelings and these things are too important to use cheap shorthand."
The Band Is Tight & A Joy To See Live
LCD Soundsystem are beloved for their energetic, cathartic live shows, where each song leads into the next and the bandmates riff with each other. They fill the stage with their talented musicians and their many instruments — several drum kits, percussion instruments and cowbells, Nancy Whang's keyboards and synths, and a whole vintage modular synth set up — and play with deft precision.
"We didn't set out to be cool. We set out to be an extremely tight band. We wanted to defy expectations," the frontman told GQ in 2018. And that they did — and continue to do.
Their live sets weave back and forth through their gem-laden catalog — when they performed 2017's "tonite" after 2005's "Tribulations" on the first night of their latest NYC residency, it's easy to forget how far apart they were recorded.
Whang and drummer Pat Mahoney helped bring LCD Soundsystem from the studio to the stage in its earliest days. Like Murphy, Mahoney played in punk bands (most notably Les Savy Fav) and his precise drumming drives LCD's music forward. Other band members include Al Doyle of Hot Chip and Tyler Pope of !!!, who bring funky guitar and bass, respectively, into the mix. Gavilán Rayna Russom offered her modular synth expertise on This Is Happening and on the farewell and reunion tours.
LCD Does Things On Their Own Terms
James Murphy cares about his art and is painstakingly perfectionist about sound quality. His stellar Despacio mobile sound room is a dark, joyful sonic wonderland — records sound as crisp and bright as ever — but is so costly to transport, they lose money when they use it.
After quitting at the height of their career, they came back when they were ready. Sure, Murphy thought painstakingly about whether he should or could release the music he'd been working on and knew there'd be backlash, but that didn't stop them. In fact, it was one of his idols, David Bowie, that encouraged him to do it.
"When I was working on Blackstar, I was talking to David Bowie, which is a luxurious thing to say. I said to him, 'I'm really freaked out as I've started writing music, what am I going to do? What if I come back after we quit so perfectly?'" Murphy told Crack Magazine in 2017.
"David said to me, 'Does it make you feel uncomfortable to come back?' I said 'Yes.' He said 'Good, you should be uncomfortable to do something. You need to be uncomfortable.' It was a funny thing to hear from him, because I always assumed he was comfortable all the time."
The band returned after four years away with a Christmas song, of all things. Almost two years later, they dropped their reunion album. They take their time with their music and release it when they're ready, on their own terms.
As the COVID-19 lockdowns eased up, they've experimented with different touring and festival formats, with their fans in mind as well as their older bodies and changing priorities. Their 2021 return kicked off their first NYC residency, with 20 shows at Brooklyn Steel (although the last three dates were canceled due to a new COVID variant spreading). They returned to Brooklyn Steel for 20 shows in late 2022, and kicked off their 2023 Tri Boro Tour on Nov. 16. The new format gives the band breaks in-between each venue, as Murphy explained the last run was a tough grind.
Murphy has also brought Despacio to more festivals recently, including his 2022 Ain't No Picnic in Pasadena, California and at Coachella 2023. He also launched the Re:Set Concert Series during summer 2023, which featured no set-time overlap and had LCD and the artists traveling shorter distances between shows.
What will 2024 hold for LCD Soundsystem? Hopefully new music to dance off the funk of 2023, more festivals with Despacio and LCD, and quotable moments from Murphy interviews, but who knows. They'll give us something great when they're ready and that will likely be just when we need it most.