The Murder Capital talk home truths, human nature, and their blistering third album 'Blindness' • Interview • DIY Magazine

“I’ll probably try to take some tips from Leonard Cohen and his years in the monastery,” begins James McGovern, with a slight smirk emerging out of the deadpan. “Bring a monastic feel to the tour, you know?” The Murder Capital’s frontman is in a buoyant mood, gauging just how ready he feels to launch himself into the band’s new era, tour – and a new year. 2025: the year of ‘Blindness.’

Having experienced burnout following their mammoth 2023 touring run, the past year has been a reset for the Dublin quintet in more ways than one. Now split across Berlin, Letterkenny and London (where McGovern himself lives) as well as the Irish capital, the outfit’s ensuing studio time became more precious – and “focused” – as they sought to break free from the tiring process that had come to characterise their time touring 2023’s second album, ‘Gigi’s Recovery.’

“On ‘Gigi…’, we demoed everything multiple times. Everything was looked at to a fine print,” he reflects. “On ‘Blindness’, we just threw the phone down and hit record… that changed the whole thing. Rather than searching for the fruit at the bottom of the crate, everything was sitting on top. Unbruised, unsqueezed pieces of music.”

Always considered with his words, James’s metaphor is spot on. Rampant opener ‘Moonshot’ is blistering from the get-go, harkening back to the band’s post-punk roots, while you can virtually feel the sweat of the live room dripping throughout lead single ‘Can’t Pretend To Know’. The hum of ‘Swallow’ is enough to bring lumps to throats, while ‘The Fall’ contends with the small matter of humanity’s tendency to curl up into a ball and deny the inevitable: “I can’t be told / I can’t be dressed / I can’t be held / I can’t be fed / I can’t be whipped.”

“Those lines [are] really an admittance. No matter how much help you have – and I have been lucky enough to have had a lot from my friends and family – you need to make that final step yourself,” he says. “You can’t whip someone to go to rehab or psychiatric care.

“Hopefully [we] can strip away the shame around those things. When you look at all these horrible things occurring around the world, unimaginable pain has been going on for thousands of years. There’ll always be struggles. Maybe this access to our inner selves is the beginning of the end of those things, even if it takes a couple of centuries.”

“I think the day that you think you’re ‘complete’ is, ironically, maybe the day that you’re dying.”

— James McGovern

Confronting one’s personal truths head-on is just one manner in which ‘Blindness’ exists across the record. The frontman addresses miscommunications in his own relationship via ‘Words Lost Meaning’, while ‘Love Of Country’ tears down a flawed patriotism, weaponised through right-wing rhetoric (“Could you blame me for mistaking / Your love of country for hate of man”). The track was first released on Bandcamp, with 100% of the proceeds going to Medical Aid For Palestine.

“It encapsulates a darker side of how blind humanity can be,” James begins. “When I see people in the comment sections saying, ‘Oh, you’re antisemites’, it’s just a gross misrepresentation of the truth. Michael D. Higgins, the Irish president, gave a great speech about this – conflating criticism of [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu with antisemitism. People are blind to that, because they’ve been fed a certain idea of what Zionism is.”

“You can feel it now because of Palestine and Lebanon, but it’s always been happening,” he continues. “There’s active concentration camps in China today. You can still get the anti-Irish sentiment in London, which is totally insane. I’m laughing, because it’s just so ridiculous – the whole idea of patriotism to the point of ownership.”

“There is no ceiling to what you can observe in yourself, your community and in people around you.”

— James McGovern

An entire species, inherently blind to our own blind spots – it can all become both terrifying and overwhelming. But the questions and self-reflection The Murder Capital invoke across the album embrace these ideas that have been “whirring around [their] subconscious.” Nonetheless, there’s a power in accepting how much you can realistically control along your own individual path. “It’s important for all of us to go easy on [ourselves],” he ponders. “We’re built to miss things, in a way. We wouldn’t be able to focus so intensely on things as human beings – and make these incredible societal developments – if we weren’t missing something at the same time.

“In past generations, people viewed their development as something that comes to an end, or at least that’s how it’s been fed in past generations. My generation – and generations below – won’t buy into that. There is no ceiling to what you can observe in yourself, your community and in people around you. I think the day that you think you’re ‘complete’ is, ironically, maybe the day that you’re dying.”

Breaking free from the shackles of perfection they chased on ‘Gigi’s Recovery’, this time around, for The Murder Capital, it’s about letting the music – and their minds – breathe at its own pace.

Living between four different cities may seem like an antithesis to productivity, but it’s just another representation of why the band, and its individuals, can exist however they need to. “When we meet, we know we’re going to be working for [a certain] amount of time,” James says. “You can get into a headspace. I can’t think of anything wrong with it. I’ve got a place to stay in Berlin [where drummer Diarmuid Brennan lives], if I want!”

With an enormous July homecoming at Dublin’s Iveagh Gardens on the horizon, the wheels seem to keep on turning for The Murder Capital, with the right mindset, and crucially, trust and belief in their craft. “I guess you can use blindness as a tool for good, as well,” James concludes, with a smile. “Pure delusion! [We have] blind faith in the band, and what we want to express. This exploration of our sound and what I want to write about, it’s a never-ending trail of fairly tasty bread crumbs. I’m just going to keep following it.”

‘Blindness’ is out 21st February via Human Season.

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