After announcing her first ever North American tour this fall, Róisín Murphy has released the video for her track “Whatever”, which is taken from her album Take Her Up To Monto. Now available, via Play It Again Sam. Murphy will kick off her North American tour on November 2nd in Toronto.

On “Whatever”, amidst a warped carousel of voices, Murphy whispers her cracked confessional, “the provocation of desire’s often mundane,” she coos. “Never complain, never explain, my love.” It’s a sobering hallucinogen. The same paradox that seems to define everything Murphy touches; this is her reality spun into an intoxicating web of hyper-real self-awareness. The video, directed by Murphy herself, further explores and blurs the lines of reality and technology.

Five intensive weeks working alongside long term musical collaborator Eddie Stevens resulted in enough material for two albums. Hairless Toys served to ease her audience into this new phase of Murphy’s career, before hitting them full force with Take Her Up To Monto.

Murphy and Stevens left some of the remaining songs almost as they’d initially demoed them, and radically reworked others as the character of the album became clearer. Like ‘Mastermind’, the breathless disco epic that opens ‘Take Her…’, which got a boost in scope from Murphy’s rekindled love of kicking out the jams and the high drama of live performance thanks to touring ‘…Toys.’

Take Her Up To Monto also cements the new role Murphy inhabits as an artist: she became a film-maker. Hairless Toys lead single “Exploitation” was her directorial debut, and from there, she has gone through “a hell of a steep learning curve” making films for each single that follows.

“Each video was a study-fest,” she says, “each one was about me watching the greats, copying how they set each shot up, it was truly like going to film school. Looking back at Hairless Toys I see all sorts retrospectively, but it feels like the aesthetic was frozen time of no-time – was it in the eighties? Nineties? Seventies? Some lost place in the memory of my generation?”

“Less reference, a more aggressively modern aesthetic,’ asserts Murphy “ It’s about the London that I live in, it’s a lot about architecture, it’s about building and the future coming, its about here! It’s a bit fizzier and more present tense, irreverent, with guerilla filming, montage and crazy shit. I hope it’s a realism that makes you feel good about being alive.”

Murphy has never been an artist to stand still, and every record she’s ever made has been a creative year zero in some sense – but even by these standards, this is a record overflowing with possibility. “Here I am,” it says, simple as you like, yet complicated enough to spend lifetimes decoding: “Here I am.”

Take Her Up To Monto Tracklisting:

1. Mastermind

2. Pretty Gardens

3. Thoughts Wasted

4.Lip Service

5. Ten Miles High

6. Whatever

7. Romantic Comedy

8. Nervous Sleep

9. Sitting and Counting

RÓISÍN MURPHY NORTH AMERICAN TOUR DATES:

11/2/2016 – Toronto, ON – Mod Club

11/3/2016 – Montreal, QC – Astral

11/4/2016 – Brooklyn, NY – TBA

11/6/2016 – Ferndale, MI – Loving Touch

11/7/2016 – Chicago, IL – Double Door

11/9/2016 – Los Angeles, CA – El Rey

11/10/2016 – San Francisco, CA – Mezzanine