Time To Get Ill

Back in 2009, Googling “Illy” produced a page of hits related to the Italian coffee brand. The other Illy – an up-and-coming young hip hop artist from Melbourne – was only just beginning to sneak onto the radar with his debut album Long Story Short and its hit single Pictures. These days, the Illy known also as Al Murray commandeers the top few spots on Google, with the coffee brand relegated to halfway down the page. The fresh-faced young artist of 2009 is now a bona fide veteran of Australian hip hop, and he's got plenty of gas left in the tank. He's overcome a severe back injury, played hundreds of shows and is gearing up for the release of Cinematic, his fourth studio album and the first released on his own label ONETWO.

Cinematic represents a return to stylistic form for Murray, as well as renewed confidence in his work. Laden with grandeur and packed with lush, genre-skipping beats (largely courtesy of his longtime collaborator M-Phazes), it represents the evolution of Murray's songwriting and worldview. Anyone with triple j on their radar will likely already be familiar with the album's lead single On & On, which has enjoyed plenty of airplay over the last few weeks. Guests on the album range from hip hop royalty Drapht and Hilltop Hoods to Daniel Merriweather and Amity Affliction vocalist Ahren Stringer, who lends his rock sensibilities to the album's second single Youngbloods. Packed with likely hits, Murray's new record feels like the follow-up to his highly successful sophomore album, 2010's The Chase. The funny part is that Cinematic is not the follow-up at all, chronologically speaking. That would be his unexpected boom-bap record Bring It Back, which he dropped last year.

“Bring It Back was a bit of a departure,” explains Murray. “I really just needed to dip my feet and remind people that I could do that sort of thing.” Despite his origins in the Crooked Eye crew, working with the universally respected M-Phazes and being signed to Obese Records when he was barely out of his teens, Murray's career has been accompanied by a soundtrack of criticism that he doesn't make “real” hip hop – and it only got louder as his profile increased. With the success of The Chase, which included the hits It Can Wait featuring Owl Eyes and the hip hop ballad Cigarettes, Murray became the face for a new, genre-shifting style of rap that wasn't afraid to hold hands with pop, and a target for people who wanted to see hip hop remain separate from other musical styles. 

Murray admits that he made Bring It Back in an effort to quieten the haters. “I felt like I needed to do that, just to remind people that I can go on a track toe to toe with the best dudes in the country and, if not own it, at least hold my own.” The album featured some of the country's most skilled MCs, including Reason and Mantra, and there wasn't a single singer letting loose over a big hook to be found. In departing from the safer trajectory of making another more fan-friendly album, Murray knew he might alienate his most ardent supporters. “I'm very proud of [Bring It Back], but it didn't have the same impact that The Chase did, and I had a lot of people who were fans – where it left them a bit confused,” he says. “I knew that was going to happen, it's the nature of what the album was, but [with Cinematic] I wanted to bring it back – no pun intended – to what wouldn't surprise them.”

In fact, the roots of Cinematic existed even before those for Bring It Back – Murray was performing Youngbloods as early as 2011. “I had [Youngbloods and] a couple of demos ready, and then I started working on Bring It Back and those tracks were sort of put on the backburner,” he says. “The real work [on Cinematic] started in earnest in January this year, and it really kicked into gear around February. The last six months have been flat-out with it.” The record features production from the likes of Jan Skubiszewski, Stylaz Fuego and Cam Bluff, but it's his longtime producer and friend M-Phazes who took on the lion's share of the work for Cinematic. According to Murray, neither of them can still quite believe the record is finished. “It's like a weight that I'm still grappling with: the fact that it's not there anymore,” laughs Murray. “I still have an inexplicable stress.”

Cinematic is likely to delight rather than shock Murray's longtime fans, but the biggest surprise of this album might lie in how proud he is of it. He seems to have overcome the industry-driven anxieties that compelled him to prove his old-school hip hop chops on Bring It Back, and is ready to make the case for the sort of music that he loves. Asked about his new material, he says: “They're not 'hip hop tracks', they're like songs. There are some banging tracks on this album – it's not like it's a pop record, but I enjoy it. I love writing big hooks. I think that's a skill that I have that I enjoy and I think a lot of people connect with [this]. I think my best songs are when I'm in this mode.”

Murray is blunt when asked how he feels about criticism of his songwriting style. “It's harder to write this stuff, that's why not many people do it well,” he responds firmly. “It takes more than just having flow and having lyrics and having bars. I think people will appreciate it for what it is but, if they don't, that's not my problem. These tracks aren't easy to write.”

In fact, the hip hop purist attitudes are less important to Murray than ever. “I think that attitude has been dying for a long time. My generation are like the third real generation of Australian hip-hop artists and we're not the young guys anymore,” he muses. “We're coming into our own and there's people underneath us who don't give a fuck about any of that shit. The kids these days just want to rap. They're listening to every genre, and all these genres coming together, and they're rapping over Flume. They're rapping over house shit. They don't care.”

Cinematic is an apt title for Murray's new album – he's ready to put himself on the biggest screens possible, to show his work to all and sundry and proclaim that this new, boundary-pushing direction of hip hop is what he loves. The album represents his total commitment to his style, having been designed for end-to-end listening – similar to the experience of watching a film. “Cinematic feels like a really big, epic album,” he explains. “It sounds big. It has an air of grandeur about it.” Of course, nothing feels grander than owning and loving what you do, and it seems like Murray has finally arrived at that point. There won't be any need for another throwback album now that he's harnessed his forward momentum.