Chet Faker Clears Up Those New Album Collaboration Rumours

With each day bringing us all one day closer to Chet Faker‘s highly anticipated second album, the Melbourne muso (real name Nick Murphy) has cleared up some of those pesky collaboration rumours which have been swirling around in the rumour mill.

Murphy’s forthcoming new album, the follow-up to 2014’s debut full-length Built On Glass, is said to be — in his words — “heavily performance-based”, with less electronic vibes and more “rhythm, groove-based stuff”.

With work continuing on the record throughout 2015, rumours have swelled about possible album collaborations with artists like Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s Ruban Nielson, house producer Todd Terje and German composer Nils Frahm.

Debunking some of these myths with triple j, Murphy says, “These things get kind of blown out of proportion because everyone gets so excited when an artist they like mentions another artist they like.”

So is an Unknown Mortal Orchestra collab prepped for the next Chet Faker album?

“We did a session at the start of the year — that’s right,” Murphy says. “Ruban and I, we hung out once and did a session, which was cool and we wrote a pretty fun song but I don’t that’s going to go anywhere. So that was cool.”

How about Todd Terje? He’s a cool guy too!

“That never happened,” Murphy says. “I mentioned that I was talking to him backstage, so that got kind of blown out of proportion as well.”

Murphy doesn’t address his mate Nils Frahm in the interview, but he does rule out lauded record producer Rick Rubin from working on his next album.

“Rick Rubin isn’t working with me on my album either, so this is good that we’re clearing this up,” Murphy says. “This is a good display for everyone out there of the 24 hour news cycle and what happens when people get bored.”

With these juicy collabs either not making the cut or not actually having taken place, Murphy says his next album is shaping up to feature only “me, myself and I”.

“I’ve been living in Brooklyn but I just moved into the city in Manhattan, just before I left on this tour. But the plan was to branch out and work with more people but then I’ve been touring so much it just didn’t really work,” Murphy says.

“Then I finally got home and had a studio and all I knew was how to do what I’d done, and then all of a sudden I had the framework of an album and I was like, ‘Ok, looks like I’m going to do it on my own again.’

“But yeah, collabs are good; because I didn’t have a studio, reaching out to guys like Marcus was the only way I could kind of make stuff. Plus, I could never make the stuff we made on my own. That’s what I wanted, I wanted to make something like this, you know? The funk.”

The “funk” Murphy refers to is his collaboration with British DJ Marcus Marr called The Trouble With Us (below) which dropped earlier this month. Murphy also featured on two new tracks by The Cactus Channel which were released in September.

Chet Faker’s final Built On Glass Australian tour starts later this week, before he headlines the biggest Australian Boiler Room event to date in Melbourne this November.

Listen: Chet Faker & Marcus Marr – The Trouble With Us