Chet Faker

About Chet Faker

Nick Murphy started calling himself Chet Faker in the late 2000s, a name that nodded to jazz trumpeter Chet Baker while signaling something different was happening. The Melbourne producer landed on a sound that mixed electronic production with soul vocals, the kind of thing that felt intimate even when it was clearly constructed on a laptop.

His cover of Blackstreet's "No Diggity" in 2011 was the breakthrough that actually broke through. It stripped the 90s R&B track down to barely-there beats and falsetto, racking up millions of plays back when that still meant something on SoundCloud. The track became one of those rare covers that made people forget about the original for four minutes.

The 2012 EP "Thinking in Textures" established what he was doing beyond that one cover. Tracks like "I'm Into You" showed he could write his own material that hit the same spot, moody electronic soul that worked equally well in headphones or at a festival at 2am. He signed with Future Classic, the Australian label that seemed to know what was about to happen in electronic music before anyone else did.

"Built on Glass" arrived in 2014 and confirmed he wasn't a one-trick artist. The album opened with "Release Your Problems," moved through the groove of "Gold" (which got a memorable one-take video of him rollerskating through nighttime streets), and proved he could sustain the sound across a full-length. It went platinum in Australia and charted in the US, which was unusual for an Australian electronic artist who wasn't making EDM.

Then in 2016, he announced he was dropping the Chet Faker name and going back to Nick Murphy. He said the alias had started to feel like a character he was playing rather than who he actually was. The 2019 album "Run Fast Sleep Naked" came out under his real name, and it sounded looser, more organic, less concerned with the late-night electronic aesthetic that had defined Chet Faker.

But in 2020, he brought Chet Faker back. Turns out you can't just walk away from something that connected with people that deeply. "Low" dropped in 2021, followed by the album "Hotel Surrender" in 2022, which found him revisiting that original sound but with six more years of living behind it. Songs like "Whatever Tomorrow" and "Feel Good" suggested he'd made peace with the alias, or at least figured out how to inhabit it without disappearing inside it.

He tours occasionally, still based in Australia, still making music that sounds like 3am no matter when you play it. The name change and the name un-change probably said more about him than most artist statements ever could.

His shows are tight and focused, built around his voice which carries the whole thing. Crowds tend to quiet down and pay attention rather than treat it as background. No big drops or moments designed to get your hands in the air, just solid musicianship and a guy who sounds like his recordings.

Known for Gold, Talk Is Free, 1998, Cigarettes Outside, Sense of Purpose

See Chet Faker Live