LCD Soundsystem

DFA

James Murphy was a studio engineer and sometime indie-rock musician in New York when, in 1999, he met the English producer Tim Goldsworthy while both were working on a David Holmes album. Goldsworthy introduced him to house music; the parties they threw became DFA, a production team and then a record label that helped define the city's dance-punk scene. LCD Soundsystem began in 2002 as Murphy's own outlet, which he described as a band about bands.

The first single, Losing My Edge, came out on 8 July 2002: nearly eight minutes of a man boasting that he was there first for every cool record, over a beat borrowed from Killing Joke, until the boast collapses into panic about the younger kids coming up behind him. Murphy said it was about being horrified by his own silliness. A string of 12-inch singles followed, Give It Up, Yeah, Movement and Daft Punk Is Playing at My House, and the self-titled debut album arrived in January 2005 with a second disc collecting them. Daft Punk Is Playing at My House reached twenty-nine in Britain, still the band's highest-charting single, and the album earned two Grammy nominations.

Sound of Silver and This Is Happening

In 2006 Nike commissioned a forty-five-minute running piece, 45:33, which Murphy modeled on Manuel Göttsching's E2-E4. Several of its ideas became songs on Sound of Silver (2007), recorded at a farm studio in Massachusetts and at DFA with the walls covered in silver fabric and tin foil. Its songs about friendship, grief and New York, including All My Friends, Someone Great and New York, I Love You but You're Bringing Me Down, made it the critics' album of 2007, and it has kept climbing since: The Guardian placed it fifth among the best albums of the twenty-first century in 2019.

This Is Happening (2010), made partly at Rick Rubin's Mansion in Los Angeles and dedicated to the band's late touring drummer Jerry Fuchs, was announced as probably the last LCD album. In February 2011 Murphy ended the band. The farewell at Madison Square Garden on 2 April 2011 ran nearly four hours, included 45:33 in full and closed with New York, I Love You. It became the five-LP set The Long Goodbye and the film Shut Up and Play the Hits.

The return

During the break Murphy opened a wine bar, built a giant sound system with Soulwax, produced Arcade Fire, and played on David Bowie's Blackstar. It was Bowie, he said, who told him he needed to be uncomfortable when he started writing again. On Christmas Eve 2015 the band released its first single in five years, and in 2016 it headlined Coachella, to grumbling from fans who had paid to say goodbye; Murphy apologized.

American Dream (2017), the last record made in DFA's old West Village building, went straight to number one in America, a first for the band, and Tonite won the Grammy for best dance recording. Since then LCD has become a residency band, playing runs of shows in a single room: Brooklyn Steel, where it opened the venue in 2017, Brixton Academy, the Knockdown Center in Queens. Gavilan Rayna Russom left in 2021. New songs have appeared one at a time, New Body Rhumba for Noah Baumbach's White Noise in 2022 and X-Ray Eyes in 2024, with an album confirmed as in progress.

Sound and method

LCD records are built by Murphy largely alone, layering drums, bass, analog synthesizers and cheap guitars, and then taken on the road by a large band that makes them physical. The gear is part of the identity: a 1957 Gretsch drum kit, old Roland and Yamaha synthesizers, a battered fuzz pedal that EarthQuaker Devices replicated in 2025, and on American Dream a Roland Jupiter-4, which Murphy said sounded better to him than almost any other synth. Critics trace the lineage to Talking Heads, Can, The Fall, Gang of Four, Liquid Liquid and Berlin-era Bowie. The emotional range is what set the band apart from its scene: long, repetitive dance tracks carrying lyrics about aging, envy, friendship and death, delivered with a mix of irony and plain feeling.

On stage

setlist.fm logs Tribulations as their most played song, followed by All My Friends, Movement, I Can Change and Daft Punk Is Playing at My House. The most played cover is Joy Division's No Love Lost. Beyond the Garden farewell, the band recorded two live-in-the-studio sets, London Sessions in 2010 and Electric Lady Sessions in 2018, and appeared on Later... with Jools Holland in 2010 and 2017 and on Saturday Night Live in 2017 and 2022. On 30 November 2026 the New York residencies reach their hundredth show.

Standing

Rolling Stone named the band one of its new immortals in 2013, and Pitchfork in 2021 counted it among the most important acts of the previous twenty-five years. Ryan Leas wrote the 33 1/3 book on Sound of Silver, and Lizzy Goodman's oral history Meet Me in the Bathroom, later a film, puts Murphy and DFA at the center of New York's 2000s scene. Franz Ferdinand, John Cale and Gang of Youths have covered All My Friends, and Kid Cudi and Hot Chip have sampled them.

Funny makes it survivable.

James Murphy, to Dazed, 2017