Fazerdaze: "Amelia Murray is so boring!"

"It excites me, not knowing what I’m doing," confesses Amelia Murray, the name behind Fazerdaze.

A native of New Zealand, she released her self-titled EP in 2014, but it’s only with the release of ‘Lucky Girl’ earlier this year that Fazerdaze started to make to make a splash over here. It’s a captivating mix of happy and sad. The repetition of "I know I’m a lucky girl" throughout the chorus leaves room for ambiguity; it’s not quite clear if she’s celebrating the fact, or if she’s trying to reassure herself in a moment of crisis.

Like many of her songs, it’s charmingly rough around the edges. It’s not polished, it’s not perfect, but then she never wanted it to be that way. "Fazerdaze is all about working it out as I go,” she explains. “It’s not a fully-formed, perfect product. It’s more about learning and inviting people to come and watch me grow and figure it out.”

It’s why, for her debut album ‘Morningside', she chose to keep everything quite close to home rather than head into a studio, something she felt she didn’t yet have the confidence to do. “My bedroom has been a safe space for me to figure it out. It just really worked for me and my personality. I find it hard to be assertive and communicate my ideas; it’s a lot easier for me just to go and do it. It was nice to work at home with my one microphone, my one guitar, my MIDI keyboard and my laptop.”

Fazerdaze has been lumped with the tag “bedroom pop”, much like Frankie Cosmos and Foxes in Fiction, but it’s a term she finds constricting. While an apt label in a literal sense, it’s a term that has become synonymous with a dreamy, lo-fi, carefree sound. “I don’t want to pigeonhole myself, and I hope ‘Morningside’ shows that there are a few more angles to what I’m doing than just effortless dream pop,” explains Amelia. “I wanna show there’s more to me than that.