Alt-rock conglomerate Love Fame Tragedy has blessed your week with two new songs. Named after a Pablo Picasso exhibition at the Tate Modern, the group is the brainchild of The Wombat’s frontman Matt Murphy, and they’ve just released “Backflip and “Brain New Brain”.
When he alluded to the project late last year, it was touted as a solo project— a foray into territory other than The Wombats, the band which he’s fronted for upwards of sixteen years. But Love Fame Tragedy is anything but: it’s an exciting new supergroup featuring Murph, Pixies’ Joey Santiago, Alt J’s Gus Unger-Hamilton, Matt Chamberlain of Soundgarden, and singer-songwriter Lauren Aquilina. Their debut EP, I Don’t Want To Play The Victim, But I’m Really Good At It will be out September 27th via Good Soldier Songs / AWAL, but in the meantime, the band has released the first taste (or two). Listen below.
“It’s great to have talented musicians, musicians who have their own niche,” says Murph on collaborating with guests from a myriad of different genres. “When you hear Joey play the guitar you can just tell it’s him and the same thing with Gus with the key melodies he chooses and the distinct sound of his voice. It’s great to have artists and musicians like that playing on songs of your own because it makes them ten times cooler, at least in your own head.”
“I tried to put my own spin on it, it was very quick and painless,” Joey Santiago adds about collaborating with Murph. “He pretty much knew what he wanted, when it was good, it was good. He’s a very talented man.”
The video for “Backflip” depicts an image of disposable dating in 2019. Here’s that video, which, according to director Tyler Cunningham, was inspired by Black Mirror— both aesthetically and thematically.
“We wanted to play on how dystopian modern dating is,” Cunningham says. “The way that you can now easily toss a mate aside if they don’t check every last box, knowing full well there’s a bottomless pit of other options waiting on your phone.The visual’s set in an alternate reality, where everyone is born with a digitally printed tattoo to correspond with that of their soulmate. This motel is a place where couples unite after finding one another online. However, our protagonist’s match doesn’t turn out to be who she thought he was.”
The group will be heading out for an exciting handful of shows in a few major cities, dates for which you can find below. While the show list is short for now, we’re hoping we can expect more dates in the future with the release of new music, which they plan to “release every month until it forms an album,” as Murph said in a conversation with us back in June. Tickets can be found here.
Love Fame Tragedy 2019 Live Dates:
Sept 17 – San Francisco, CA @ Rickshaw Stop
Sept 19 – Los Angeles, CA @ Moroccan Lounge
Sept 21 – Chicago, IL @ Subterranean
Sept 24 – Washington, DC @ Rock & Roll Hotel
Sept 25 – Brooklyn, NY @ Rough Trade
Sept 26 – New York, NY @ Mercury Lounge
