[At] some point I began to see the bulk of LCD Soundsystem’s catalogue as revolving around exactly this question: What happens when you really devote yourself to something, over the longest possible term? First it was music. If there’s any one thing the young people seduced by pop music tend to have in common, it’s some desire to become part of the music they love — to slip, at least a little, into the world, lifestyle, and history contained in their record collections and magazines (digital or otherwise). Murphy had already doubled down on that desire, and his brightest idea was to sing about where it led. LCD’s first single, “Losing My Edge,” was a monologue in which the most clued-in person on the scene — the one with immaculate knowledge of the whole canon of vital underground music — watches his position get usurped by younger kids. It’s a blithe parody, a hilarious in-joke that critics lapped up. But it’s also an incredibly serious song about dedicating yourself to something ephemeral; it could just as easily be about aging prizefighters or models or any other form of inevitable obsolescence.

…

Now that there’s no longer much money to be made in dragging your band as far as it will go, it feels like most musicians would rather just leave an ideal little history to be admired by some future generation of record collectors. With this group, Murphy’s done a solid job of that. But it’s hard to imagine he won’t stick around the music world doing something — I mean, what else would he do?

Nitsuh Abebe nails it.