Seeing a stranger on the street, making longer-than-normal eye contact, imagining a life with them, and forgetting it two days later is a canonical experience. You don’t know anything about them, yet you’re imagining an entire love story. Chet Faker questions not just love at first sight, but the entire concept of a stranger in his latest album, A Love for Strangers. How well do we know the people we love? How ‘unknown,’ really, are the people we’ve just met? The artist blends soul, indie, and pop in his new record. Written during an emotionally tumultuous time following his father’s sudden passing from Covid-19, and set between confusing relationships, Faker ruminates on the tensions of a life where love is at once the ultimate anchor and yet not enough to keep things afloat.
Faker (real name Nick Murphy) seemingly can’t stop making music. This restless drive for growth and creation has led his career to many places; from a Super Bowl commercial cover of No Diggity to jumping between his moniker Chet Faker and his birth name, the Australian artist is not afraid to experiment. Not taking himself too seriously catapults his music to a level that doesn’t feel polished or "made for the masses," but rather like an honest conversation with himself. In A Love for Strangers, that conversation centres on the way love develops, dissipates, returns, and leaves you utterly raw.
Starting with Over You, Faker explores the fear that a relationship could become mere memories, that a person could become (not to quote Gotye, but) somebody that you used to know. Reflecting on a breakup is a gruelling experience that yanks you back into happy times before plunging you into a startlingly lonely place. Faker outlines how the back-and-forth of getting over someone is rarely linear. You can go around in circles before you finally break the cycle, and even then, you might still go back to relive those memories.
Throughout the album, the artist is truly a yearner. He pleads for love, though he doesn’t necessarily feel he is ‘enough’ for someone. In 1000 Ways, he sees all the angles from which his partner is lovable (that in every scenario, he would choose her) but one of them is running. The lack of control one has over emotions and another person’s thoughts teaches a lesson in letting go, but it isn’t an easy one. It’s a song that belongs in the background of a relationship montage; it’s the story of a couple who end up parting ways but toe the line incessantly throughout their time together.
The album was written over the last six years, with This Time For Real being the first song recorded. Its upbeat tempo is a contrast to the majority of the record, with lyrics communicating a renewed love for love itself, a determination to try again, even if going in blindly. The album then takes a much calmer turn into Can You Swim, which feels like the record’s emotional reflection point.
Faker speaks to the overwhelming aspect of love that requires care and understanding to avoid drowning in its abundance. Without the tools to do this, which he attributes to not being taught by his father, love quickly turns into something unmanageable. It isn’t that it should be mediated, but that love shouldn’t feel like an elephant sitting on your chest. It won’t always feel light or flow naturally; rather, it’s a collage of the deepest emotions that inspire your insides to feel like calm waves. That doesn’t mean it will always be carefree. Sometimes it is like a tidal wave crashing into you, but in an understanding relationship, you have built a raft, learned to swim, and you know when to escape to higher ground.
Remember Me and Inefficient Love continue with this theme of love seesawing, constantly changing. The intensity can quickly turn into an emotion equally as sharp if you cannot accept change and ground yourself in a real person, rather than who your emotions make them out to be. When the rose-tinted glasses come off, will you still love what you see? Faker’s acoustic sound here is melancholic, brooding over the confusion of a shared life.
In The Thing About Nothing, featuring aLex vs aLex, we finally hear a woman’s voice — possibly the woman he’s been talking to this whole time. They plead with each other to help one another understand themselves. It’s as if they don’t know themselves well enough to love each other in the way they were meant to; an emotional language barrier created because they haven’t yet discovered their own identities. This is further reinforced by the two lines in Spanish: “Ven, que yo te sigo / Yo voy a donde tu te vas” (Come, I will follow you / I’ll go wherever you go). She overextends herself into him, and vice versa, showing an intense yet somewhat naïve connection.
In the final tracks, the confusion of finding oneself is palpable. From the grasping for clarity amidst the overstimulating noise in Oh No Oh No, to the faint voice losing its footing amidst loud instrumentals in A Level of Light, and the healed yet tired Just My Hallelujah, the album wraps up — not with a bow, but with a ‘Caution: Fragile’ sticker. It’s an album you could listen to on repeat, starting the journey over and over, much like the cycle of healing itself.