The Murder Capital

“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.