Róisín Murphy’s relationship to music is inextricable from place. As a kid growing up in the small town of Arklow, on Ireland’s east coast, the electropop luminary watched her family sing together at boozy get-togethers, became obsessed with the famously uncanny cover of Grace Jones’ 1985 album Island Life, and roamed arm-in-arm with her girlfriends, belting “Like a Virgin” at the top of their lungs. “When we were all virgins!” Murphy recalls, laughing raucously.

Sitting in a private members’ club in London’s Soho, Murphy is telling me the musical story of her life with bawdy flair. Her Irish accent is marked by the gravelliness of her teenage years spent in Manchester, where she found her fellow “weirdos” at psychedelic clubs, set to the sounds of the Jesus and Mary Chain, the Stooges, and My Bloody Valentine. Then the clubs started playing dancier rock bands like the Stone Roses, “and out of nowhere came all these lads who were dressed like football hooligans,” she says. Ecstasy had arrived. “These were guys that would have normally beat us up, and they come in and they were hugging us!”

She threw herself into the seedier parts of the Manchester music scene, briefly fronting a noise band, And Turquoise Car Crash The, in which she pretended to scream down the phone to emergency services. “The first gig was legendary,” she recalls. “It was unbelievable how many people came! Then all the people in the audience got on the stage and all the people onstage got in the audience and there was a fight.” The second show didn’t have the same buzz, so the band split. “‘Scared’ is not a word that you would apply to me as a teenager,” she says. “Just very curious and open. I went all sorts of mad and wonderful places.”

Murphy followed a boyfriend to Sheffield, which had an equally fertile electronic scene, and soon met musician Mark Brydon. That first night, they went to his studio, where she “chatted shit” over his music—a recurring pattern as they became romantically involved. Brydon, who had done production work for Boy George, Cabaret Voltaire, and others, was offered a six-album record deal and asked if Murphy wanted to go in on it with him. She was shocked, thinking that they were just joking around. “But it was a way for us to be together,” she says. They made it through four albums as Moloko, their success peaking in 1998 with “Sing It Back” and then again in 2000 with “The Time Is Now,” which married the era’s fascination with the Balearic islands to classic ’70s pop craft. Brydon and Murphy eventually split up, slogging through a final album, 2003’s Statues.

She began her solo career with the sharp one-two punch of Ruby Blue (2005) and Overpowered (2007), idiosyncratic, major-label pop records made several years before major labels really had any idea what to do with left-field pop. After she had her first kid in 2009, she found herself frequently alone (“I needed me mum,” she says). So she went back to Ireland and didn’t make another album for eight years. She DJ’d a lot, taking her mum and baby with her. Then, in 2012, she had a second child with her current partner and collaborator, Italian producer Sebastiano Properzi.

After two more solo albums, Murphy got back to tending her collection of fantastic one-off singles last year. She tweeted at one point about feeling exhausted, “banging her head against the wall” of an indifferent music industry. That situation got sorted, she tells me now, staying vague about precisely what changed. “It’s just not feeling like you’re carrying all of it on your own shoulders,” she says. “It’s having people who love you around you.” While distressing to read, Murphy’s tweets underscore her willingness to ask for what she needs and demand credit for her work. She has a 24-year career under her belt and a catalog that keeps getting better: This summer, she released the impeccable diva-house cut “Incapable,” which she chased with the razor-sharp disco throwdown “Narcissus” last week.

“There have been times where I’m like, ‘I don’t like backing down, I wanna fucking do what I wanna do,’ and somebody will go, ‘You’re so arrogant.’” She sighs. “I wouldn’t have any juice to make it if I didn’t feel that way. I couldn’t do what I do without passion. I would’ve given up years ago. I wouldn’t even have started.”

Here, she talks about some of the songs that fueled her curiosity along the way, five years at a time.