‘I Refuse To Believe (You Could Love Me)’ is the new single and video from John Murry, released on Submarine Cat Records. The track is the latest to be lifted from Mississippi-born Murry’s forthcoming third album The Stars Are God’s Bullet Holes, produced by John Parish (PJ Harvey, Eels, Aldous Harding, This Is the Kit) at Rockfield Studios in Monmouth. Also available now from the album are previous singles ‘Oscar Wilde (Came Here To Make Fun Of You)’ and ‘Ones + Zeros’.

As with those tracks, this new single shares their lyrical ingenuity and a sadness that is shot through with humour, albeit a spectacularly black humour. Interestingly, ‘I Refuse To Believe (You Could Love Me)’ has Murry venturing into the realm of unexplained disappearances – an English aristocrat and an Australian politician: “Lord Lucan, he could not tread water / Prime Minister Holt? He never came up for air.”

“This song is my take on what Ric Ocasek (RIP) from The Cars mighta written if he had been into those dark "UK Surf" era Pixies mixes and found himself a bit trapped in Kilkenny, Ireland, for some years and - while there - grew a bit more alienated, broke, maligned, and bored by the day, then week, then month, then years. Ric would've probably written something much catchier, but y'all catch my drift, yeah?”, Murry further explains.

The Stars Are God’s Bullet Holes is an album of startling imagery and insinuating melodies, of cold moonlight and searing heat. It’s a record that penetrates to the very heart of you, searing with its burning honesty, its unsparing intimacy and its twisted beauty.

Murry’s previous two albums had been responses to specific traumas: the centrepiece of his debut, The Graceless Age (“…a work of genius” ***** The Guardian) – the astonishing ‘Little Colored Balloons’ – told of his near death from a heroin overdose; its follow-up, A Short of History of Decay (“..delivers in gloriously dysfunctional bucketloads” **** Mojo), was recorded in the wake of Murry’s marriage failing. The Stars Are God’s Bullet Holes, coming six years after Murry left the US for Ireland, is the result of a period of stability, though in Murry’s case it’s all relative. “I think a lot of what we call contentment is delusional,” he observes.

Murry found a kindred musical spirit in John Parish. The need for trust when they recorded at Rockfield was total, and Murry and Parish quickly established a deep bond. “Trust matters a great deal,” Murry says. “All my mad ideas, John would facilitate those fully, and get the value of them.”

“I think he encourages co-conspirators,” says Parish of Murry. “He’s quick to identify and enlist whatever skills are in the room at any one time. I hope that I gave him the freedom to pursue outlandish ideas, and the confidence to know that someone was keeping track of them and would know how to fit the puzzle pieces together.”

The pair brought out what was needed on The Stars Are God’s Bullet Holes: the simple pleasures of playing guitar figures, of working with sympathetic people, of playing music that has the same ragged looseness of Murry’s inspirations and fellow Mississipians RL Burnside and Greg Cartwright (Reigning Sound, Oblivians). No one would mistake it for a blues or garage punk record, but there’s that same organic sense to its rumbling guitars and contained wildness, nurtured by Parish.

One of the record’s delights is a stark and subdued version of Duran Duran’s ‘Ordinary World’, and it’s not surprising, perhaps, that a song about someone looking for the ordinary world in order to learn to survive might resonate with Murry. Has he found his own ordinary world? “In a sense I have. I realise now I can come back from things like trauma and the decisions I have made. Ordinary for me has become just a matter of accepting who I am relative to what I do. I've pulled out each and every one of my ribs at night when I sleep. I don't need God to do it.”

The Stars Are God’s Bullet Holes is not an album for an ordinary world, because it’s not an ordinary album. It’s an album to dive deep into and submerge yourself in, and to emerge from awareness that this world is a remarkable place, and that John Murry is a remarkable artist.

The Stars Are God’s Bullet Holes LP Tracklist:
1. Oscar Wilde (Came Here To Make Fun Of You)
2. Perfume & Decay
3. The Stars Are God’s Bullet Holes
4. Di Kreutser Sonata
5. I Refuse To Believe (You Could Love Me)
6. Ones + Zeros
7. Time & A Rifle
8. Ordinary World
9. 1(1)1
10. Her Little Black Book

To be released June 25th on Submarine Cat Records