Fazerdaze – the enigmatic alter ego of New Zealand singer, songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Amelia Murray – was an artist propelled very quickly into a whirlwind of success. Driven by the critical success of her 2017 debut album, Morningside, she was playing covetable festival slots and touring globally – all by the age of 24. But things weren't as picture-perfect they seemed for Murray, and the musician quietly retreated into a years-long hiatus. Fans were left to wonder if Fazerdaze was gone for good.
But in 2024, Murray reemerged with Soft Power, a record she calls a “bedroom stadium album.” It’s raw yet expansive, introspective yet defiant – a manifesto for an artist who has shed her skin and reclaimed her voice. We spoke to the musician about growth, alter egos, and how Soft Power marks not just a return but a reinvention, both sonically and personally.
Murray has spoken freely in interviews about her need to step away from her former life, yet she returns still as Fazerdaze, an alter ego that allows her to feel a bravery that normality doesn’t often allow. “I think it gives me a space and separation from Amelia Murray,” she tells me. “I know I felt really small in my life and really ordinary. Fazerdaze is a space where I can build this dream world. One where I tap into braver versions of myself, which I think, day-to-day, I honestly struggle with.” Murray builds her world with music, colour and fashion, experimenting in a surreal alternate life that is separate from her actual one, living with her housemates and biking around Christchurch.
“I know I felt really small in my life and really ordinary. Fazerdaze is a space where I can build this dream world. One where I tap into braver versions of myself, which I think, day-to-day, I honestly struggle with.”
As much as Murray retreated from her music, she also retreated from a former life that no longer served her. Emotionally, she explains, “It t almost felt like I'd gone out too far. I needed to pull back, because it freaked me out so much.” Murray needed to recalibrate. “I think maybe I'd gone so far out publicly without the emotional and psychological grounding to really be out there. I was definitely just really suffering from imposter syndrome, and I think the retreat was about [recognising that] it's not really sustainable to be feeling this uncomfortable all the time.” Hearing Murray speak is evocative of the line in Stevie Smith’s poem, Not Waving but Drowning – “I was much too far out all of my life” – and is not an uncommon feeling for an over-extended artist.
Youth and domineering relationships certainly played into Murray’s double retreat, but she confesses that her “natural state is to be quite open minded. Maybe that's being an artist, maybe that's being a woman, maybe it's being both, but I can be really open minded.” Candidly, she is aware that this may have made her more open to manipulation, but the more beautiful side of her openness was a “sense of awe”. Murray explains to me that music is something she had dreamt of her whole life, so when someone who was musically informed and saw her as a creative for the first time, it had a huge impact on her.
However, Murray has come out the other side of this period of transformation, and whilst she carries the same project name, she also carries a renewed energy and enthusiasm. The process of writing her sophomore album, Soft Power, she tells me has come with learnings. “Just returning back to listening to my intuition, listening to my body and finding the quiet space to listen to myself” is central to her journey. Murray feels she was trained out of listening to those “basic markers”, so there was a revelation in the simple signifiers. This return has been influenced by her move to Christchurch, allowing her to hear herself. “Being someone who's highly sensitive, there's just so much noise in the world. It works for me really well to live somewhere really quiet.”
Whilst Christchurch might be quiet, Murray’s bedroom was the source of her ambitious soundscapes on Soft Power. She had “the desire to take up all the space and, you know, sonically, to just be as large as I could. I think it did really help from feeling so oppressed and feeling so small.”
The scale of the record was bolstered by her friends, who would discuss the album’s themes and visuals, sending Murray films like Last Night On Earth, assisting with the songs themselves, and providing unconditional support for someone who had so much taken from them.
The album was eventually released on Murray’s own label, Butterfly Records, which was born out of finding the music industry complicated, confusing, “and not always artist friendly.” For her, the label was symbolic of something a little more feminine – right down to the name: “I wanted to call it something really cute”. Its formation was inteded as an antidote to the rejection from former labels and “feeling not good enough”. Essentially, Murray tells me, “I just thought, well, I'll just do it the way I always do it, which is, I just do it anyway.” I wonder aloud if, subconsciously, Murray chose the butterfly as a symbol of her metamorphosis, but she explains, “I think butterflies, to me, represent freedom, and I think it's about creating spaces and music that feel freeing for me, which has been really hard to find.”
“Being someone who's highly sensitive, there's just so much noise in the world. It works for me really well to live somewhere really quiet.”
In tandem to making Soft Power, Murray was absorbing art. Deeply inspired by a Hilma af Klint exhibition (the Swedish artist and mystic who locked up her art until her death, giving people time to understand it), Murray says she was ‘“really affected in a profound way. I think it just gave me the energy to keep going when I was really struggling to have the belief to keep making art. [Klint] just completely reinvigorated my excitement for creativity, and then also confidence in your own creativity as well.”
Additionally, Kate Chopin’s 1899 novel The Awakening was subconsciously simmering in Murray’s mind. “I mentally revisited that book when I finished this record, and I think that book stuck with me in ways I didn't quite realise.” Perhaps the parallels of a young woman wanting equality in her relationships and more than a domestic life were particularly pertinent for her. “I had definitely felt that pull in my own personal life, of being a woman in a relationship and love, and then this kind of pull towards motherhood and this domestic path, which I wasn't ready for. I couldn't understand why there was this sort of force around me to head this way.”
The last key pillar in Murray’s trinity of inspiration for Soft Power was Tame Impala’s Lonerism, their second album from 2012. Murray explains that it came to her at “such an impressionable time of starting music school and being at uni”. Lonerism’s free structures and introversion represented the antithesis of what Murray was being taught at university. “I think Soft Power is me trying to make that record that I heard at university that just felt like it was made for me […] I was trying to make the sister record to that era of my lie. What are some things I wish I could have told myself?”
Lyrically, Murray tells me she is constantly striving to “walk the line between intimacy while also having privacy”. Her use of vocal effects, to obscure her voice or sit them back in the mix, creates an air of mystery over something so personal to her. Despite wanting to feel close, Murray still spares herself from what she deems ‘the vulnerability hangover’. “I love delay and reverb. I love painting colours with vocal effects that put this veil on the lyrics.”
“On stage, that's definitely the place where everything makes sense again, and my reason for why I’m doing music clicks back into place. Everything else melts away.”
Murray writes every day to fuel her lyricism but finds melodies will often come to her when she is doing something as simple as cooking dinner. Whilst she is horrified at the thought of anyone reading them (as we all are), flicking through the pages with fresh eyes can find one key line that will spark a completely different train of thought.
It’s a bizarre paradox for many introverted artists that the stage is the freeing space, rather than the privacy of the studio. “On stage, that's definitely the place where everything makes sense again, and my reason for why I’m doing music clicks back into place. Everything else melts away.” For Murray, the intensity of performance is what forces her to get out of her own way. “It's no longer about me anymore. It's about giving the people that have shown up something special and worthwhile. And so, it really pushes me to just let go and trust and tap into something divine.”
For those who want to see Murray tap into the divine, she will be touring with The Pixies this year in the US, which is no small achievement. Returning from her retreat, we wait with bated breath to once again bask in the presence of her soft power.
Experience the Retreat issue in its entirety this March, available on newsstands from Thursday 6 March 2025, and through our online shop. Find a stockist near you.
PHOTOGRAPHY Mia Rankin @ LIMINAL REP
FASHION Hannah Cooper
TALENT Fazerdaze
HAIR Adam Dyer @ Saunders & Co
MAKEUP Nisha Van Berkel @ Assembly Agency
PHOTOGRAPHER’S ASSISTANT Mesquite
STYLIST’S ASSISTANT Koby Dulac-Daley
CREATIVE STUDIO & CAMPAIGN MANAGER Olivia Repaci
