Amelia Murray

INFO

Name	Amelia Murray (she/her)
Also known as	Fazerdaze, Amelia Rahayu Murray
Born	1993
Country of Birth	Aotearoa
Place of Residence	Ōtautahi Christchurch
Ethnicities	Indonesian, Pākehā
Artform	Music
Decades Active	2010s, 2020s

ABOUT

Amelia Murray is a pop musician who performs under the name Fazerdaze, known for her collision of intimate lyrics with fuzzy, dreamy melodies.

Born in Pōneke Wellington, Murray grew up the youngest of three siblings and began playing guitar when she was 13, forming a girl band at Onslow College called The Tangle. After high school, Murray moved to Morningside in Tāmaki Makaurau to study a Bachelor of Music in Pop Music at The University of Auckland. Her debut self-titled EP — released in 2014, when she was 21 years old — was an immediate success, with demand growing to the point where she had to abandon the DIY-burnt CD with hand-stitched cardboard cover approach she’d taken, and work with a CD manufacturer.

Shortly after this, Murray was signed by Flying Nun Records. In 2017, she released bedroom dream-pop shoegaze album Morningside, “filled with songs reflecting on intense teenage friendships, inward-looking love songs, the joys of travel, and being bad at replying to texts” and featuring “foamy waves of guitar with Murray’s warm, sighing voice”. Recorded in different friends’ houses and studios, the varied locations “reflect how displaced and unsettled I was feeling while making it” and she describes the album as “a safe space for me to process and observe myself.”

Morningside was a critical success, praised for its “melodic strength and musical maturity”. The album launched her onto the international stage and she toured Australia, the UK and the US, as well as performing at festivals like London Calling (2017), Reeperbahn Festival (2017), Way Back When Festival (2017) and Coachella (2018).

Following her tour, Murray describes feeling a deep sense of burnout. “I think I didn’t realise how much work it is to create the product and also be the product.” She has also described feeling stuck in toxic professional and personal relationships. “You can get so caught up in these false constructs of niceness and loyalty — these rigid societal constructs of what being a ‘good’ person is,” Murray has said. “But the best thing I did for myself was break free of that paradigm and ruthlessly start putting myself first.” Her gritty, bratty and fun EP, Break! (2022) “is a punctuation mark of that.”

Completed while she was living by herself during the COVID-19 lockdown, the work moves across a range of styles — “Detours are made into riff-heavy krautrock (‘Thick of the Honey’, co-written by Bic Runga), and sample-based trip hop (‘Winter’), alongside slabs of distorted guitar and anthemic choruses (‘Break!’, ‘Come Apart’). On ‘Overthink It’ she even veers close to a rap delivery” — and was named one of Rolling Stone’s Best New Zealand Albums of 2022.

Murray currently lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch. “Christchurch felt like a clean slate for me,” she has said. “I didn’t know the city before the earthquakes, but the strength and the restructuring and the rebuilding is quite inspiring for me… having to go through a restructuring and rebuilding in my own life, it feels really good to do it here.”