Blindness
It was over a meal towards the end of touring their second album, *Gigi’s Recovery*, at the end of 2023 that the artistic blueprint for what would become *Blindness* came into being for The Murder Capital. *Gigi’s Recovery* was a mesmeric leap forward for the Irish quintet, the tightly wound post-punk of their 2019 debut, *When I Have Fears*, unfurling into something more wide-screen and dramatic. However, extended bouts of touring, including support slots with heavyweights Pearl Jam and Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, had turned The Murder Capital into a dynamically thrilling rock band. They wanted their next move to reflect that. “There’s quite an expansive and indulgent cinematic approach on our second record,” singer James McGovern tells Apple Music. “We went for dinner, and we all came together in agreement that we wanted to inject an urgency and an energy back into the music again. It was probably the first time we had a shared manifesto going into making a record.” It has resulted in an epic but lean rock record, the grooves a little looser-limbed, the hooks sharp—the sound of a band realizing exactly who they are three albums in. “We stripped back our process completely to a whole different way of working,” says McGovern. “We made no demos going into the studio, just phone recordings, and that really refocused us on what the substance of a song actually is, what we’re drawn to and what it means when it’s just those bare things.” Exploring themes of patriotism and nationalism alongside reflections on love and romance, *Blindness* is a gripping listen from start to finish. Let McGovern and guitarist Damien Tuit guide you through it, track by track. **“Moonshot”** Damien Tuit: “We wanted to open the record with this because it just bursts out of the speakers.” James McGovern: “It kicked the door down. It stood for everything that we’d set out to do in the very beginning. As you make a record, you’re brought down all these other garden paths that you don’t expect, but ‘Moonshot’ really just kind of stood for that. It had that exact character.” **“Words Lost Meaning”** DT: “This is an example of us being more than the sum of our parts. Gabe \[bassist Gabriel Paschal Blake\] had the bassline for the verse, and then I got some chords together for the chorus, and then James has this hook. It’s everyone working together, and it came together in a couple hours.” JM: “Months later, we were talking about this tune, and Gabe told us he was having a row with his girlfriend, and he’s not really a man of conflict, so he took some space for himself and went to play some bass and do a bit of writing, and that’s where he wrote this bassline. It’s kind of funny how the subject matter of the song unknowingly became about friction within a relationship itself.” **“Can’t Pretend to Know”** JM: “This has been through many different footings. It was a tune that I started out at home on the acoustic. I felt a love for it pretty quickly and then brought it in, and it went through a few different phases.” DT: “The initial version was slowed down: Pump \[guitarist Cathal Roper\] was doing a Chili Peppers kind of rhythm. When we were in the studio, John \[producer John Congleton\] forced us to push it full tilt. It was one that really grew in the studio.” **“A Distant Life”** DT: “That was written on tour. All the venues on this UK tour were freezing for some reason, and I had my guitar on. I was just plucking away, and James came up to me and was like, ‘Let’s just write a song.’” JM: “We were in transit to one of the many inspiring service stops in the UK, and I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, *Poetry Unbound*, hosted by Pádraig Ó Tuama. It’s a beautiful podcast, and he was doing Margaret Atwood’s ‘Bread,’ and she had a line in it about the salt taste of a mouth or something like that, so I nicked that line and started writing in the service station. That night, I went up to Irv \[Tuit’s nickname\], and he had two chords, but it was where he took it.” DT: “I played the first two chords and then just started following where he was going vocally, and that was that—the song pretty much done.” **“Born into the Fight”** DT: “We fucked around with a couple of different time signatures on this. You have to do that on one song every album before you go back to the time signature you can play in. This was Pump working his magic. Those were his chords, and it’s always nice when he’s playing keys because he just adds a different dimension.” JM: “I was really enjoying writing about rejection of faith and exploring that, having conversations with the lads about their experience of growing up in Ireland and saying prayers in class and all those things. There was a good tinder there that we wanted to keep exploring.” **“Love of Country”** DT: “We were jamming in the room in Dublin, and James was writing in his notebook, and then we stopped, and he read us out this poem and the room was just silent. We were like, ‘Yeah, that feels great.’” JM: “I know a lot of artists say this, but sometimes you are writing, and it does feel like you’re observing it a bit. The whole poem came out fully formed, really. I don’t think I edited anything in it. It was something that I’ve wanted to express for a long time. It’s not just the fact that we’ve just seen the riots in Dublin, or it’s not just the fact that there’s a hyper fixation on national ideologies globally now. It’s also feeling, as a kid, the anti-British sentiment on the playground or all these things and feeling rubbed up the wrong way by that stuff, this kind of ownership over land. It all seems to have come together into this tune in some way, as a small part of that conversation.” **“The Fall”** JM: “This was the first thing in my lyric notebook from this whole record. I’d written them in Cologne on tour. I remember all us really buzzing on the chords for this tune. We had a really good time playing it in our road-testing shows that we did at the MOTH Club in London and The Grand Social in Dublin. People were absolutely going mad for it, so it had something—we just had to put it together. It’s about how no one can change you but yourself, no matter what you’re going through, really.” **“Death of a Giant”** DT: “We were in Dublin, and Shane MacGowan’s funeral was on \[in December 2023\]. We all went and watched the hearse go by in the streets and then went straight into the room, and James just put some words about it to the music.” JM: “It just so happened that the procession was that day. We were just there to pay our respects. I think if the Irish do anything well, they celebrate death well. There was a real beauty to everything about the hearse, these black horses—the most majestic horses you’ve ever seen—and the young marching band. I didn’t really grow up on too much of The Pogues or Shane MacGowan’s work; it was only in my early twenties and starting this band, hanging out with mates and other bands, that I started to get into the breadth of his work. You could feel it that day with people singing on the street that there’s just something about him. I think, through all of his personal struggles, he as an artist really had his finger around the pulse of humanity more accurately than a lot of artists—and with such vulnerability and \[as\] a real true romantic as well. It’s nice to tip our cap in the only way we really can.” **“Swallow”** DT: “This began in my apartment with a loop, and James came over, added his part. Pump came over another day and added a part, edited it together, and then we sort of had demo-itis with it for a long time. One of the big lessons doing this album in the studio was trying to be kind to the music—something I think we struggled with generally. It’s difficult when you’re writing music—being gentle with how you critique and how you try and mold it and how you collaborate, because when you’re writing an album in the way we do—which is real true collaboration where we’re all bringing in stuff—there’s going to be some stuff that you don’t see for a long time.” JM: “That was me. I couldn’t see this song’s place in our world, but by the time it started to get recorded, I understood it. I had a great struggle with seeing this tune. Now I love it when I listen to the record.” **“That Feeling”** JM: “This was a really exciting one because it just fell out of a jam. We were in London in our studio in Holloway \[north London\]. We came back from a lunch break or something, picked up the instruments, started playing together, and there was ‘That Feeling’ almost in its entirety.” DT: “This one might be the only one that was born from a true jam on this album.” **“Trailing a Wing”** JM: “There’s a sweetness to this. I can’t really put my finger on it, but it’s there. It’s also a funny one. We played a show in Belfast, and I was out for dinner with my couple of cousins and aunties and stuff up there. We were in a Thai restaurant, and an actor who will remain unnamed walked into the restaurant, and my aunt said, ‘There’s that fella, he’s always trailing a wing.’ So, I was like, ‘What does that mean?!’ Obviously, he just cheats on his wife loads, but I thought it was a beautiful adage!”
Blindness succeeds for its craft-related enhancements, but more so for how it distinctly channels The Murder Capital's rawest impulses.
On ‘Blindness’, The Murder Capital aim to purge the inertia behind their previous record, ‘Gigi’s Recovery’, but occasionally fall short.
Back in the late 2010’s, The Murder Capital – together with Fontaines D.C. – became the poster boys for a new generation of Irish post punk bands. But
Blindness by The Murder Capital album review by Sydney Peterson for Northern Transmissions. The Irish band's new LP drops on February 21st