Photography by Ceidra Moon Murphy

‘Black Eye’ is the intimate, lost and love-struck new heartbreaker by Martha Skye Murphy out on Slow Dance.

What is immediately startling about the new release by Martha Skye Murphy is it’s sense of solitude, a feeling of vulnerability and it’s strength in honesty. Black Eye is the touching follow up to last year’s EP Heroides.

It’s almost as if the delicately-told story that makes up Black Eye, takes place in Martha‘s own head or perhaps seeps into that of the listener. A subconscious conversation with one’s self, where emotions are most honest or at their purest state, untangled by having not yet spoken them out loud.

Coming from a place of honestly, and with a strong storytelling nature to her music, the South East London native uses little more than touches of piano to create Black Eye‘s haunting and deeply personal soundscape. Deeper bass sounds and scattered backing vocals adorn a track which bypasses it’s surroundings and sits heavy on your chest.

‘Black Eye is about folding in on yourself; relationships at night, the drunken slurs, the dysfunctional patterns that occur. The torture of reflection and the agony of half formed memories. Longing to know where they were, wishing you were there.’ – Martha Skye Murphy

You can instantly feel how well suited Martha‘s vocal was to singing on Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds stand-out record ‘Push the Sky Away’, and the tour that would come with it. And in reverse, how this would inform her own music and shape her aesthetic and artistic vision, bolstered by studies of History of Art at Cambridge.

So relatable in it’s feeling, Martha Skye Murphy employs her hypnotic and beautifully strange vocal to great effect, the skill of restraint and simplicity leaving space for you to drift away into your own parallel universe.

Live Shows
06 June – Sebright Arms, London w/ FAMOUS – Tickets.

READ MORE 

Tiña – ‘I Feel Fine’ – Thrillingly ferocious pop. 

Tree House – ‘Head Up High’ – Instantly addictive, groove-heavy return.

WOOZE – ‘what’s on your mind?’ EP – Off-kilter, riff-heavy grooves galore.

By Karl Johnson

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