“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.
