With A Love For Strangers, Nick Murphy steps back into Chet Faker and reshapes it around a period of change that left a clear mark on both the sound and the writing

It’s his first album under the Chet Faker name in four years, following 2021’s Hotel Surrender, and it arrives carrying more weight than anything he’s released in that stretch. The songs were shaped during a period that included personal loss, relocation, and a long stretch of uncertainty, all of which pushed Murphy inward before pulling something more open back out of him.

That push and pull defines the album. Across 12 tracks, he leans into questions about connection, especially the kind that doesn’t come easy. These aren’t love songs aimed at one person. They’re about learning how to relate at all, about choosing empathy when it doesn’t come naturally, about figuring out how to meet people halfway when the ground keeps shifting.

Musically, he circles back to what made the original Chet Faker records connect, but he doesn’t treat it like a formula. There’s more movement here. Breakbeats hit harder. Saxophones drift through the mix. You can hear flashes of late ’90s and early 2000s influences, from radio pop to rave-adjacent textures, all pulled together in a way that feels tactile and immediate. It’s detailed without getting crowded.

“Far Side of the Moon” is built on restless rhythms and a sense of emotional overreach while tracks like “A Thousand Ways” and “This Time For Real” balance self-awareness with a lighter touch. Even when the subject matter leans heavy, the arrangements keep things moving, never letting the album stall out in its own weight.

A lot of that comes from how hands-on Murphy was this time around. Aside from a small number of collaborators, he handled much of the process himself, including mixing, chasing a very specific sound he couldn’t quite translate to others. That control shows. The record feels unified, not in a polished way, but in a focused one.

There’s also a sense of rediscovery running through it. Revisiting his breakthrough era around Built On Glass seems to have reminded him what worked in the first place, but instead of repeating it, he filters that instinct through everything he’s learned since.