The Murder Capital
Post-punk
"There's what's in front of us, in our immediate field of vision. There are the things we can touch, the love we can feel. Then there's everything else. Blindness is the warped belief. The behind us. The secluded. Love at a distance. Faith in denial. Distorted patriotism. The fading face of moments in the rear view. Blindness brings it all into focus." - James McGovern, September 2024
'Blindness' is the vividly realised, clear-sightedly ambitious new album from The Murder Capital. A record that's both momentous and charged with momentum. That's full of geography - of the mind, and of a Dublin-formed band whose members are now scattered around Ireland, London and Europe - yet bristles with the intense energy of an album finely wrought in three pacy weeks in the studio in Los Angeles. That's intimate and simultaneously expansive. Eleven songs that don't hang about in terms of grabbing the listener.
Or, as frontman and lyricist James McGovern puts it, with appropriate directness: "In writing the songs, our feeling was: piss or get off the pot. We wanted to needle-drop straight into the feeling of these tunes."
It was a sense - prioritising urgency, energy, freshness - baked into the songs from their earliest incarnations. At the urging of John Congleton, the seasoned, Grammy-winning producer who worked with the Irish band on last year's second album Gigi's Recovery, they didn't demo anything. "He wanted us not to start layering any tracks or anything like that, just phone-record everything. That was so that, by the time we got to the studio, no song was suffocated by what it needed to be. It was more about what the song could be."
Those principles are there in spades in scorching, razor-wire guitar anthem and first single Can't Pretend to Know, smartly described by McGovern as a "whip of a tune. We wanted to create this hurricane of colour and immediacy and breathlessness. And it speaks to the record as a whole and the options we had. It spoke to us as the opening statement as we release these tunes."
As for the inciting image of a someone who's "just a plastic figurine" early in the lyrics, McGovern says he's looking back - not in anger or nostalgia, but in a desire to avoid wilful blindness.
"I'm looking at the bridges between childhood and adulthood, the beautiful delicate ones that get burnt. I'm looking back at learning lessons from toys as a child and what that meant. The parts we're asked to play as we get older. We can all at times become happy enough playing our little part in this life. Taking the shape of plastic toys."
'Blindness' was born from a few years in the young life of The Murder Capital that were heavy with possibility and with dread. The band shot out of the traps in 2019 with much-praised, Flood-produced debut album When I Have Fears. Then, the following year, after the clock struck Covid, the band ended up making Gigi's Recovery while bunked up in a country house in Wexford for nine months, "losing our fucking minds, basically. We then went to London for three months. Those longer stints in one place left a lot of room for inertia to let itself in the backdoor."
Finally released in January 2023, Gigi's Recovery did what it needed to do: helped the band continue gigging anywhere and everywhere, deepening and widening their fanbase through its near-left turn from the sound of their debut, and consolidating a reputation as a ferocious live act. "We had a massive festival season - we did 35 or 40," remembers McGovern. "Then we did another tour, The Clown's Reflection tour. That went through Europe and the UK in seven weeks. By the end of the year we were shagged, basically!"
But when the frontman listens back to the album, he hears an album fogged by claustrophobia. True to his lyrical forthrightness, he adds that he also hears "at times an overwritten record, which is what happened. We had too much time to find problems in the tunes that were never there. And we weren't rowing in the same direction, it was a collision of vastly different creative directions. Whereas Blindness is the first time we're firing on all cylinders. Reaching for the same desire."
"That began with a feeling on stage, towards the end of 2023," McGovern continues. "We started understanding more how Gigi had all these expansive moments, lots of building crescendos and a more cinematic approach to making a record. Which was satisfactory in the studio. But in the live show, we started to feel like we wanted to just get into the essence of the fucking tunes. Again, piss or get off the pot."
So eager were The Murder Capital to crack on that, having finished The Clown's Reflection run on the Saturday, by the Monday they were in a room together in Dublin. "That was fairly contentious because we were all in bits after that tour. But that turned out to be the most fruitful two weeks we did."
Being back in the city where they formed for the first time in an age was inspiring. The result was 12 tunes written in 10 days from a band who were "really drinking from the same stream - we'd work on two tunes a day: one in the morning, one in the afternoon. A third if we'd had our Weetabix." Equally, "things started happening - Shane passed away and we went to the procession on Pearse Street in Dublin. That became a new song, Death of a Giant."
Shane is Shane McGowan, that talisman and lion of Irish poetry, punk and passion. The band felt privileged to be able to exercise their grief attending his funeral parade - and then to exorcise it by writing Death of a Giant, 147 clattering seconds of taut, post-punk reportage from a day when all Dublin was united in loss and celebration.
"That was a new thing as well for me lyrically - to write about exact time and place. Although when I was there, I wasn't thinking about writing the song. I was observing the moment. It was obviously immense and sad, but it had that sense of community, everyone singing the tunes at the top of Pearse. I'm biased," he acknowledges with a grin, "but I can only get that particular feeling in an Irish community."
There was, too, a wider, richer perspective animating The Murder Capital's new set of songs. That was in part down to the diverse perspectives the five members were bringing to the creative process, differing worldviews arising from their literal new positions in the world. Drummer Diarmuid Brennan was living in Berlin, bass player Gabriel Paschal Blake was in Letterkenny, guitarist Cathal "Pump" Roper was in Donegal, and guitarist Damien "Irv" Tuit and McGovern were in London.
This meant breaking up writing trips to travel to the different musicians' areas or countries. "Although we'd all been to these places, there was a definite feeling that you were being hosted by the bandmate who lived there. There was a fair sense of holiday too, which needless to say we took advantage of, but also that you were getting to understand the reason your bandmate chose to spend their life in this place. So, actually, living in different countries made us feel closer to each other in the end."
Finally, after pinging around Dublin, London, Donegal and Berlin - and after a pair of crucial road-testing underplays at London's Moth Club and Dublin's Grand Social - in spring The Murder Capital headed to California.
"LA was interesting," McGovern begins with a wry smile. "We almost didn't make the record. In pre-production we had a massive fight. There were issues of ego, creative process, issues of communication. There was 24 hours where we didn't know if we were going to be a band anymore, let alone record this album."
It was, though, ultimately, a positive blood-letting. One they moved through as a unified front. With the argument having robbed them of a crucial couple of days' recording time, in the final hour of the last day McGovern was trawling through his phone notes for another song to try get finished.
"I found this tune that myself and Irv had written in his apartment six months prior." It was a song with a title taken from a dinner McGovern had in Belfast with his cousin before the last show of The Clown's Reflection tour. His cousin remarked on a certain person in the restaurant and their infidelities, proclaiming "that fella's always trailing a wing". At the time McGovern didn't know what that phrase meant, but the imagery stuck with him.
And so Trailing A Wing was written. A strung-out meditation on love, faith and fidelity, it now closes Blindness. It's bookended, meanwhile, by Moonshoot, the rocket-powered anthem that opens the album - or, even, kicks the doors down. Tellingly it, too, was recorded by a band running on fumes.
"There's a real lesson in recording that song, it's one I wrote a couple of years back but it ended up being recorded in the last two hours of the session," remembers McGovern. "Irv didn't wanna be there, he was completely burnt out. So we approached it like: 'Let's smash it out, see what happens.' I was in the booth, putting down the vocals having changed some lyrics last minute, and I was looking at him, he appeared defeated. I was thinking: I'm either going to goad him into making something great, or he's going to snap at me.... So I went over to him and said: 'Just let it out...' He ended up smashing his guitar all over the place and it turned into the most beautiful tones and flecks of paint across that track."
Then there's Love of Country, a song that started life "as a big rock odyssey banger", but was subsequently dialled down to something more meditative, ruminative, Neil Young-ish and, in the finished album version, a total live take from start to finish. All 5 members in the one room. Written "as a poem in one stream, in about five minutes, it ended up reflecting what's happening to our society more potently than I feel I have before," says McGovern, highlighting the closing lyric: "Could you blame me for mistaking your love of country for hate of man?"
"I'm relieved to get this off my chest," the singer explains of a song with contemporary resonances in the riots that rocked Dublin, as they did several English communities, in the summer. "Growing up I always felt torn about the idea of staunch patriotism. In Ireland specifically, as a kid in the playground there was an ease of use of xenophobic sentiments thrown around. It always caused friction for me. In my experience, patriotism itself often comes with the baggage of discrimination toward others. Of an above-ness. That's not right. And certainly not right coming from an Irish person. A nation of emigrants. That song is finally expressing that confusion for me: why is one's love of country intertwined with hatred for another?"
McGovern writes even more closely to home in the rock anthem Words Lost Meaning, a song built round a Blake bassline. "G only told me recently that he wrote the bassline as a way to find space during some conflict in his own relationship, which is symbiotic to what I ended up writing about on this tune. An experience I had in my relationship where I felt at times that the words 'I love you' had been used to a point of dilution. As a way to evade discomfort, or close a conversation over text while we're apart and I'm on the road. There was a debate about whether or not I should say 'I love you' at the end. But that was the point of the tune: what could've been the dissolution of my relationship, and the real love we share, became a turning point of realising the gravity of those words and what they represent."
There's more, much more, to be released from, and about, Blindness in the months leading up to its release in early 2025. As James McGovern says: "When we sat down to figure out what the album was about, we ended up with three broadly sweeping themes: faith and patriotism through the lens of Irishness, love songs and dissecting relationships, and more introspective looks at things like addiction and mental illness."
For now, The Murder Capital are allowing themselves a satisfied exhalation after several months spent travelling the roads and miles of their respective lives, and of the essence of their band, and distilling all that into their fired-up third album. They stretched out in the summer with European and British shows supporting Pearl Jam, and will be doing more of that in the autumn with a tour with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.
McGovern - a lyricist who's never not composing ideas and a frontman who's never not honing his stagecraft - will be watching the headliner, a songwriter's songwriter and performer's performer, "every single second". Because no matter how successful your band, every day's a school day.
And in whatever way Blindness is the "warped belief", there are always insights to be found from the stage, in the crowd, in the moment, in the music. With the blinding clarity of their visionary new album, The Murder Capital can see that now.
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