LCD Soundsystem is James Murphy’s infinite jest.
And just like that, they’re back! Ending a seven-year silence, the band returns with their latest single, “x-ray eyes,” marking their third unexpected reunion.
In 1996, David Foster Wallace wrote a 1400 page novel called Infinite Jest. In the book, James Incandenza, an avant-garde filmographer, produces a film by the same name. The film is so captivating that anyone who watches it—even Incandenza himself—becomes ensnared in an unbreakable loop, unable to stop rewatching it until death. That same year, James Murphy, a then-listless, wannabe-professional musician, had a transformative experience reading Wallace’s novel that single-handedly springboarded him out of depression and resulted in the creation of his dance-punk band, LCD Soundsystem. Since then, despite Murphy claiming a number of times that the band was done for good, he remains stuck in a loop of his own, drawn back to that which continues to captivate him: reuniting LCD Soundsystem.
In the late ‘90s, Murphy was a rudderless ship, a self-described “abject failure”. He had dropped out of college to pursue making music, but had nothing to show for it. Paralyzed by the fear of creating something only to fail, he “claimed safety in doing nothing”. It’s as he put it, “talent is usually just afraid to fail and stays home”. At 26, Murphy realized he was no longer “the young guy” anymore and that his life wasn’t unfolding as he’d hoped. Around this time, he read Wallace’s Infinite Jest and plunged into a profound despair. He felt incapable of ever creating something as significant as Infinite Jest, and the thought of this cemented his sense of failure as a sort of self-antigen he was tethered to. This experience struck the death knell for Murphy, galvanizing him to seek help from a psychiatrist, who ultimately helped him redirect the course of his life.
In the early 2000s, Murphy finally began working in the music industry as a sound engineer and DJ in Brooklyn. He was principally interested in some of the intangible qualities of music: its mythology (and the propensity to “look for things” within it), the beauty of “stupidly essential” lyricism, the “physicality” of sound in its purest form, and its potential to be “sonically revelatory”. He was drawn to experimental forms, such as atonal music and abstract expressionism, which pushed the envelope of what would traditionally be considered music, as well as bands like Rites of Spring, whose music fomented physical action during the Revolution Summer of 1985. Though he lamented seeing music become increasingly commodified, he also believed that those who opposed this trend were like “crabs in a barrel,” unable to stop the natural flow of the industry’s desires. In short, his interest wasn’t just in the postmodern, but in what came after it—the post-postmodern and even the post-post-postmodern.
In 2001, Murphy founded DFA Records, a record label, and the following year, formed his band, LCD Soundsystem. Having acquired such an eclectic and idiosyncratic perspective of the music scene, he felt his tastes were unique from other burgeoning musicians. However, as younger DJs began to adopt similar views, he became defensive, feeling as though he was “Losing His Edge”—a phrase that would later become the title of the band’s first ever release. In 2005, LCD Soundsystem released their debut, self-titled album, continuing to achieve commercial success with new music until their first disbandment in 2011. Murphy, who had long portrayed himself as a “self-possessed control freak” with difficulty collaborating, described most bands as “phony democracies,” where attempts at egalitarianism end up as “group therapy”. This belief, paired with his controlling nature, ultimately drove him to split up the group in 2011 after an extravagant final show at Madison Square Garden, declaring that the band would never reunite. As Pitchfork’s Matthew Strauss put it, “Since the band broke up, [they] have since squashed every rumor imaginable that [they] would get back together.”
After disbanding, Murphy returned to his career as a producer and sound engineer, working successfully with notable musicians while maintaining his creative vision. However, in 2015, LCD Soundsystem reunited unexpectedly to release “Christmas Will Break Your Heart,” their first single in almost five years. Murphy briefly resumed his role as a producer, but after a conversation with David Bowie, he was inspired to bring the band back together. In 2017, they released American Dream, their most commercially successful album to date. It became their first number-one album in the United States and earned a Grammy for the single "tonite." Yet, after that release, the band separated once again. It seemed that every time momentum started to build, Murphy would shut everything down, driven by his individualistic approach to music. And so, that brings us to today—after a long seven years of radio silence, seemingly out of nowhere, on October 22, 2024, LCD Soundsystem released their new single “x-ray eyes,” followed by the announcement of an album set for release in 2025.
As the band's existence continues to vacillate, one wonders: Why do they keep coming back? Serendipitously, on page 900 of Infinite Jest, Wallace offers a prophetically fitting answer to this question: “We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately—the object seemed incidental to this will to give ourselves away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. … A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into.” So, here’s the moral/strained metaphor: Just as James Incandenza will remain enraptured with his film, so too will James Murphy remain enraptured with LCD Soundsystem. Whether or not the band is technically together, as Primavera Sound put it, “their time is always now.”
edited by River Wang.
album artwork believed to belong to either the publisher of the work or the artist.