Crystal Murray has released her new EP ‘Anatomy Of A Cry’, out now via Because Music.
The Paris-born, London-based singer-songwriter has spent the better part of a decade building one of the more genuinely singular profiles in European alt-pop, drawing on a background that includes a jazz saxophonist father, David Murray, and a mother who runs an international music production company.
Previous releases have pulled freely from R&B, neo-soul, shoegaze and electronic music, earning her collaborations with producers including Sega Bodega and a Converse campaign alongside a growing body of work that refuses to sit still.
‘Anatomy Of A Cry’ is her most emotionally direct project to date. Written and recorded largely alongside her longtime guitarist Adrian Edeline, with sessions taking place in Stockholm, the EP takes its title from a specific moment: attending a performance at the Stockholm Philharmonic, where her friend and musician Boerd played double bass, Murray found herself in tears within the first minute as more than fifty musicians locked into a single note.
The experience set the conceptual frame for everything that followed. “I found the name of the project when I was watching my first ever concerto in Stockholm,” she has said. “It felt like looking inside a mind and how mathematically and directly something can make you cry when you are plugged a certain way.”
The EP mixes opaque indie pop with alt-R&B across a set of songs that treat crying not as metaphor but as physical phenomenon: the mechanics of emotional response, the body’s involuntary reaction to beauty, loss and memory. Lead single ’73’, co-produced by Sega Bodega, set the tone earlier in the year, its folky guitar and vocal given shape by electronic production.
Murray has said the EP marks a shift away from writing primarily about love and towards something more interior: “This is the first project where I’m not writing only about love. I talk about the relationships I have with myself, finding peace within myself, but also finding the manic and chaotic energy that I don’t try to hide.”
‘Anatomy Of A Cry’ is out now.
