What happens, Peter Murphy asks, when folk raised on punk rock and electronic music and who've read too may dystopian novels end up in their own nightmare, thanks to recent world events? You get this second Cursed Murphy Versus The Resistance album, the follow up to the rather excellent debut from 2020.

Straight out of the traps - and tearing at the muzzle of conformity - this sounds like a more rounded piece of work. Because it’s Murphy you're offered Codeine at the door as the driving bass of ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’ – life, as we know, has become a Bradbury fantasy rather than a Shakespearean aside, and The ‘Murphy are the creepy traveling carnival with their own Mr. Dark - welcomes you to this new world, one where we’re all girdled with this condition we call human. The guitar on the title track – a republic where even the birds are hardcore - is a distant relative of Depeche Mode’s ‘Enjoy The Silence’ and ‘Hold The Line’ is a groove from the wrong side of the town as Murphy struggles to keep his head above the rising water. ‘Dopamine’ descends further into the nightmarish. Is this uncomfortable? Well “this is the hit, you asked us for it, it’s what you wanted, man.”

Lighter is the wrong word, but the mood alters slightly for the twisted love poetry of ‘The Agony Of The Leaves’ where the strings and the baritone guitar have a cold beauty, before the industrial pulse of ‘This Is Not Your Love Song’, and then things head off past the edge of the map. ‘Federal Hall’ documents in spoken word a death disco that sways to memories after the fall, and ‘Borne On Earth’ goes further again into an imagined future where Murphy becomes part of the machine and his offspring head off into the out there beyond our own. ‘Sometimes You Sing A Dark Song’, referencing Brecht, Townes Van Zandt, and other honorary Murphia members, serves as an epilogue to what has gone before, a song of acceptance of whatever fate awaits, “whatever may come down, let it come down.”

A weary address to a crumbling world, rock n' roll for a new reality, the piper at the gates of dusk, a soundtrack for those about to slip under, this second Cursed Murphy Versus The Resistance album takes you down into the Republic Of The Weird that is the inside of Peter Murphy’s head. Roll up, roll up.