Following the release of her sophomore album Soft Power, Amelia Murray (Fazerdaze) tells Alex Casey about heading south and rediscovering herself.
Fazerdaze is back in Morningside, but everything has changed. “It’s so strange to be back, ” she says softly, gesturing out of The Spinoff’s office window at the drizzly grey Auckland afternoon. “I just lived about a two minute walk away from here.”
The central Auckland suburb was home for Amelia Murray, aka Fazerdaze, for much of her 20s, even lending its name to her debut album released in 2017. Morningside catapulted Fazerdaze to indie dream pop darling status, with the “wistfully forlorn but beamingly optimistic” lead single ‘Lucky Girl’ making Buzzfeed, with Pitchfork praising the album’s “effortless pop songs that are far less effortless than people think” and Mojo hailing the “Pixies-worthy melodic highs”.
But when Murray thinks of Morningside now, the feelings evoked could not be further from the crisp blue cloudless sky and streams of sunlight that radiate off her star-making album cover. “All of these streets now remind me of just walking around in a total fog, and how much I was struggling with mentally,” she says as rain patters quietly on the window. “It was like I couldn’t even see that it was hard, because I couldn’t really see anything in that headspace.”
The “fog” are the years that came after Morningside when, as Murray’s career was blossoming, she says her personal life and mental health completely fell apart. Under a lot of pressure to deliver new music, burnout and mental exhaustion had blocked her creatively, and she says she felt like she had lost identity within her domestic life. “The facts were that I was in a relationship with someone 20 years older than me, and I–” she pauses, eyes brimming with tears.
“I was just so young that I think I just eroded in that dynamic.”
Murray stops herself again, and apologises profusely as she wipes away a rogue tear rolling down her cheek. “I do really want to talk about it but I actually haven’t quite gotten to the point where I can talk about it without crying,” she says. “I’m now in my early 30s, and it’s just hard not to get emotional looking at the stuff I went through when I was younger, especially when I didn’t have the tools and the community around me to support myself and my career.”
Even in the depths of that fog, which saw her disappear for five years, she still felt new songs fighting their way through her subconscious. “It’s like there were these songs that I was trying to suppress, because they were showing me a side of myself that I was trying to bottle up,” she explains. “And then when everything in my life fell apart, I realised the songs were actually telling me something. They were just feelings I didn’t want to explore – like rage and resentment and disappointment.”
Murray eventually listened to herself, and says that one day “the clouds parted” and she knew what she had to do. “I had this whole awakening and I felt like I reconnected to my fierceness and anger and all of these things that I had conditioned out of myself.” In 2020 she moved out on her own with no money, no job, her career on hold and her confidence shaken, and crashed in a friend’s empty apartment for six months. “It was pretty ugly, but when my life fell apart was actually when it all started.”
All of that frustration and catharsis erupted in her EP Break!, which brought with it a much more frenetic energy, distorted vocals and much darker themes (from the title track: a low key loser, a stranger to herself / for the moment drift into her hell). Murray released the EP in 2022 after she made her own break from Tāmaki Makaurau – swapping the central city bustle for the sleepy suburbs of Ōtautahi. “I needed to go somewhere that was a bit removed from the industry, somewhere that could be an Amelia place, rather than a Fazerdaze place.”
Heading south also had other obvious benefits for an artist in a state of flux. “The cost of rent was actually accessible for me. So much of Fazerdaze is just me working by myself at home, and I really wanted that space to be protected and quiet and on my own terms,” she explains. “Christchurch offered that life for me. I can bike everywhere, I can live really cheaply and do my art and I don’t feel all this pressure to make it big – even though my ambition is still there.”
She found a place in one of Christchurch’s northern suburbs, and set up a home studio to continue work on what would become Soft Power, her second album released this week. “I definitely am much more grounded here, and I have found other people have the capacity to be a bit more grounded because not everyone is in a rush,” she laughs. When she wasn’t working on the album she’d go running in the Port Hills, and swimming at Sumner Beach.
“It feels like a much more balanced life. I didn’t realise how on edge my nervous system felt in Auckland. What’s crazy is that my hair has grown back thicker.” I suggest we could make that the headline. “Go for it,” she laughs. “Hair is thicker in Christchurch.”
What has also strengthened is her resolve to work on her own terms and trust her own creative instincts. While working on Soft Power she went back to Los Angeles to collaborate with a “top shop producer” and found herself jaded and underwhelmed by the process. “It was useful in that I got home and I was like: ‘I know how to finish this, and I know I can do it myself’.” Murray is also now self-managed: “I used to be very tolerant of things in my career that wore me down in ways I didn’t see,” she says.
“Now I would rather just feel good in myself and be less successful, then try to overstretch and be in these dynamics that just made me feel anxious. For so long I put music on a pedestal above myself, and now I’m making decisions for Amelia, rather than for Fazerdaze.”
Murray explores the idea of having multiple facets of yourself existing in the music video for ‘Cherry Pie’, one of Soft Power’s lead singles that marks her return to floaty, melancholic pop. In it, she appears as two characters: a young baseball cap-wearing driver and a glammed-up, lipstick-wearing passenger, hurtling through the empty streets of Auckland. “I really wanted to have both my future self and my younger self in the car together as these different versions of me that evolve through time, and how they relate to each other and let each other go.”
Now in her 30s, Murray is also grappling with the trappings of time in ‘Cherry Pie’ (Youth is running out / We finally feel it now / The years from here get faster). I posit a theory that the song could be a melancholic sequel to soaring synths of The Naked and Famous’ ‘Young Blood’ from over a decade ago. As it turns out, Aaron Short from The Naked and Famous worked on the track. “I got stuck on the song, and I realised I was actually trying to tap into that ‘Young Blood’ feeling,” Murray says. “I sent it to him and he knew what I was trying to do immediately.”
As well as wrestling with the “sore” feelings of getting older – “sometimes I just get these waves of ouch, that my parents won’t be around forever, that I can feel time pulling my friendships apart” – Soft Power is also about mental health. In ‘A Thousand Years’ she bracingly reveals the reality of high-functioning depression (No use trying to get out of it / ‘Cause there’s no way out of here / Play to the crowd till I disappear). She shot and edited the Cindy Sherman-inspired video for it herself at home in the depths of “freezing cold” Christchurch winter.
With so much of her deeply painful and personal experiences poured into the album, Murray feels a sense of relief that Soft Power is finally going to be released to the world. “I’m ready to let it go,” she says. “Also, everything is just suddenly happening really fast now.” She’s currently touring with Pond around North America and Canada, has just been announced as the support act for Finneas when he tours New Zealand and Australia in January, and teases a handful of other big Fazerdaze announcements to come soon.
But between all of that, she’s still making time for herself. “Putting out the record feels like such a mountain, that I think I’ll probably just be writing and chilling over summer. I wish I had all these exciting cool plans, but honestly I just love pottering around.” The plans she does have include starting a small vege garden, maybe doing a bit of yoga, maybe camping, maybe a run and a swim at New Brighton Beach. Fazerdaze will undoubtedly have to pop up for the occasional gig, or interview, but Amelia will always come home.
“I feel a mixture of exhaustion and feeling really content with everything I’ve gone through, and now am putting it all behind me to enter this new chapter of my life. Big feelings, but beneath it all is just peace,” she says. “I’m letting myself move forward.”