Sobriety. Solitude. Existential dread. In Moby’s world, these are just the working conditions.
“I have a lot of free time,” he says early on, almost apologetically. “I’m not in a relationship, I don’t have a family, I don’t drink. So... what else am I going to do?” The answer, naturally, is make another record. And another. And another. Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt dropped in early 2018—barely six months after his last full-length—and it may be his most emotionally open work since 18. It’s also a sonic about-face: less punk screed, more electronic requiem. A low-lit gospel seance for a world slowly devouring itself.
He’s still Moby, of course. Still vegan. Still political. Still somewhere between ambient monk and internet oracle. But he’s also channeling something else these days—something haunted, scorched, and bruised around the edges.
The album’s lead single, “Like a Motherless Child,” is based on the traditional spiritual, a form he’s returned to time and time again. “I’m just drawn to the longing in those songs,” he says. “They’re simple, direct, emotional. That’s all I care about when I make music now—how it affects me emotionally. If it doesn’t hit me in the gut, it’s not going on the record.”
The song also echoes his earlier track “The Day,” written after losing his mother—a trauma that still hovers over his songwriting like a ghost at the end of the bed. “Sure, it’s autobiographical,” he admits, “but the goal is to take something personal and turn it into something universal. Like Bowie’s ‘Heroes’—it’s just two people in Berlin, but it ends up being about all of us.”
That sense of collective grief and spiritual drift runs through every title: “The Wild Darkness,” “The Last of Goodbyes,” “The Ceremony of Innocence.” Even the album title itself, borrowed from Slaughterhouse-Five, reads like a tragicomic dare. “You can’t separate the art from the context it was made in,” he says. “And right now, the context is grim.”
Grim, yes, but also strangely lucid. He’s not yelling into the void—he’s observing it. Calmly. Like a monk with a Wi-Fi password.
“I watched this documentary recently,” he says. “There was this watering hole in Africa during a drought, and all the animals had gathered around it. Lions, hippos, zebras. And these tiny little monkeys would sprint up, grab a handful of water, and run back before they got eaten. And I thought—those are our ancestors. Terrified monkeys, stealing sips of water filled with hippo poop. That’s us. We’re still those monkeys.”
The metaphor sticks. His theory is that humanity hasn’t really evolved emotionally—we’ve just swapped the watering hole for Instagram and the hippos for corporations. And the existential crisis we’re all collectively wading through is entirely self-inflicted. “Our ancestors suffered because of famine and wild animals,” he says. “We suffer because of decisions we keep making. Bad ones.”
Which brings us, inevitably, to politics. Moby has never been shy about calling out power structures, but in early 2017, he went full citizen whistleblower, posting cryptic social media updates about Trump and Russia based on intel from friends in the CIA. “They told me: ‘You have a bigger social media following than we do. Can you post this stuff?’” he explains. “So I did.”
A year later, the glimmer of hope he once held that Congress would do the right thing has dulled. “I assumed they’d be interested in investigating collusion with a hostile foreign power,” he says. “But apparently, party loyalty trumps decency now.”
Still, he’s grateful for one thing. “Our president is incompetent,” he says, dry as sandpaper. “If we’re gonna have a tyrant, let him be stupid.”
Despite the doomscrolling and dread, Moby’s not curled up in a bunker. He’s making plans. An acoustic orchestral record is on the horizon, reworking older songs with all live instrumentation. “Just to see what they sound like,” he says. “No electronics. Something different.”
But for now, it’s Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt. An album that somehow balances personal grief and collective collapse with meditative grace. A quiet, sobering howl into the dark.
So maybe the monkey’s still running. But at least the soundtrack’s devastatingly gorgeous.
Listen to the interview above and then check out "Like a Motherless Child" below.
