Blindness – das neue, gerade erschienene, dritte Album der Iren von The Murder Capital ist lebendig umgesetzte, klar und ehrgeizig konzipiert und eine Platte, die sowohl bedeutsam als auch voller Schwung ist. Sie ist voller Geografie – des Geistes und einer in Dublin gegründeten Band, deren Mitglieder nun über ganz Irland, London und Europa verstreut sind – und strotzt dennoch vor der intensiven Energie eines Albums, das in drei rasanten Wochen im Studio in Los Angeles fein ausgearbeitet wurde. Blindness ist intim und gleichzeitig weitläufig. Elf Songs, die den Hörer sofort in ihren Bann ziehen. Es folgt auf das von der Kritik gefeierte Gigi’s Recovery und ihr Debütalbum When I Have Fears aus dem Jahr 2019.

Wir trafen den Murder Capital Sänger und Songwriter James McGovern am Morgen des Release-Tages zum Zoom-Interview, um mit ihm über das neue Album der Band zu reden!

It fascinates me to see how you have managed to put out an album that is very personal to you, yet it seems equally able to represent broader societal sentiments. Can you talk me through the themes of this album?
It is essentially a love album, a look at like Irishness and patriotism, the sort of conflation of patriotism and nationalist ideologies. And, yeah, it was a sort of critical eye, but not judgmental, I would say. So yeah, I think, there’s also just, like a kind of a general introspection that runs through the DNA of our records anyway, just the way that I write, really, when I’m writing it. I think you can find, as a writer, the outside by looking in. You know, there’s a sort of a sense of universality inside all of us. So, yeah, I think that’s generally what it’s about. I don’t know. Sometimes I don’t find it till a year later or something.

You start off the album with an absolute bang, kicking in the door really, with ‘Moonshot’. What was the intention here?
Literally, what you just said, that’s why it was chosen to open the record. I think it was, I think it very much spoke to the kind of manifesto we went into writing this album with, you know, yeah, just that kind of intensity and urgency.

It’s so loud that it almost made me fear the remaining 40 minutes it it had that energy. So, it was very nice to see that the album then also takes a little bit more of a relaxed approach in other songs, which I also hadn’t heard necessarily that much before in your work. I was in particular impressed with Love of Country, the lyrics of which reminded me a bit of The Clash’s ‘The Call-Up’. Unfortunately it also seems to be quite relevant, especially this week looking at the news. Can you tell me a bit about what made you write this song?
Relevant to the news in what ways do you mean?

Well, the love of country and the hate of man. If you look at the security top in Munich this week and all the revelations with Ukraine, it seems quite relevant to reflect on these themes that you mentioned in the song. This week it became quite urgent.
Yeah I get you. I was genuinely asking, cuz I haven’t been watching the news this week so. It’s important to take breaks watching the news. I think. I think the message within that song is probably, probably been relevant. You know, for 1000s of years, just feels maybe more prevalent right now, in some ways, because I don’t know how to describe it. I mean, maybe this is like an experience of every generation in some regard, for the last, you know, couple of centuries or whatever. But it just feels like everything’s becoming extremely politicized now, you know, like every sort of conversation and every thought and every sort of perspective in the world feels very politicized. And these things just don’t feel political to me in some way, you know, like I’m kind of losing sight of what that word even really means. And when it comes to a situation like Palestinians, you know, or Lebanon, or in the Ukraine, it’s like, it’s just like a humanitarian, a human sort of crisis, you know as human terror, human slaughter. And the sort of political lens becomes, I think, overlooked and overstretched, I guess. You know, it just doesn’t seem as important as just the human struggle that’s going on. You know what I mean? So that’s kind of, hopefully that song is just kind of shining a light on some part of that distorted patriotism. Yeah, there’s lots in there. Though, there’s a lot of imagery, and that’s that tune for me. There’s a lot of a lot of imagery from like, the pandemic in Dublin, and I think the riots and.

You recorded it all in one sitting and one take even, I believe?
That’s right. Just one take, the five of us and no edits made or anything.

And was this the first time doing a recording like that?
Yeah, probably. I mean, we did a lot of live takes on When I Have Fears, our first record, but we did overdubs and different little bits and things like that. I can’t totally remember, but I would say this is probably the very first time. Yeah.

I want to talk a bit about the artwork for the album. On the first album cover I see echoes of Robert Mapplethorpe, and the second I see Vincent van Gogh, I think , pardon my Dutch.
That was beautiful to hear the correct pronunciation. Beautiful, man.

Thank you. And so what influenced the artwork of Blindness, because there seems to be a lot of influences present in your artwork so far?
That’s interesting, I hadn’t thought of those influence. The first record was just sort of I was scouring Magnum archives and different photo archives to find something for it. That image is an image of refugees in a sandstorm in Jordan, like the 90s, I think, or the early 2000s. Just a very damning and powerful photo. The second record was painted by our friend Peter Doyle. So we asked Peter to do the artwork before we even, I think, before we finished the album definitely before we recorded it, anyway. We just wanted Peter to do and then with Blindness, we worked with Victor H, a Swedish artist and graphic designer, and just kind of, yeah, really, really amazing guy. He’s done some cool albums. He did, like, some more kind of, like poppy, mainstream stuff. He did Rosalia’s album, The Motoma thing he did. Steve Lacey’s record. But he just makes this really exciting way of approaching art, man. He’s just got this really kind of like untethered eye. And we went through a couple of different ideas of what this album cover could be. And once he did this, and he, I think he took it from a lyric in ‘Love of Country’ – “mothers with their plucked wings” – this just hit home for us, you know. We just wanted to have, like that central figure. It kind of ties in. They all, all of our albums so far have the central figure in the artwork, and we wanted to sort of. I don’t know if we, like formed, accidentally formed, some sort of trilogy of albums. I don’t know if these albums are kind of inextricably linked, but in some ways, I feel like they are.

I read that the live performances near the end of your last tour for Gigi’s Recovery have determined the sound that you were going for on this album and how you really wanted to dig into the tunes this time with the band. What has been the greatest shift in composing this album as opposed to earlier ones?
I mean, the greatest shift was the entire process. We shifted everything really, you know, we changed how we wrote. We changed how long we wrote for, like, where we did it, you know, like, Yeah, I mean, the last album we did, we were in a countryside house for nine months. We probably wrote the album over like 18 months. We were all together writing all the time, all day, through the night, sometimes. You know, it could be any time. It was all very just kind of went on and on, to be honest. This records, you know, we also looked like through that time of writing. Second record, we demoed everything you know, to a very magnified place, lots of different parts and instrumentation and textures over it, and worked a lot on the language of new sort of sonic textures for us for a very long time before we even got into the substance of what the songs were about, you know.
And totally different, yeah, this time we just, like, we didn’t demo anything, we just threw a phone down in the middle of the floor of the studio. We wrote it over, ostensibly, about six weeks. I mean, we’d obviously work towards those times of writing together at home alone. You know, the mean of it. But yeah, everyone lives in different cities now. So we wrote in Berlin, we wrote in London, we wrote in L.A., we wrote in Dublin. For like two weeks at a time as well. So it was very much like get in there, you know, 11 or 12 days in the studio and just be sort of in that moment, you know, there was no sort of like, “Oh, we’re here for nine months now, whatever.” So everything was different. Like, you know, I got to the studio. There’s no demo ideas because we hadn’t demoed anything. We didn’t demo one of the songs. We just had these phone recordings of a live take of them so they could kind of become anything in the studio. You know, they were just like these tunes we loved, as opposed to these demos we needed to recreate.

I really want to compliment you on the sound and the production of this album. It seems also really like a step up. Not that the last albums weren’t sonically rich but this time, it really feels like you’re sitting in the orchestra pit and the music happens all around you. It’s very direct. And I was wondering what it is like to work with John Congleton, who has worked with so many different artists and is a producer with so much experience.
Yeah, it’s, it’s amazing, man, you know. John really reshaped our creative process in many ways, like in the way that we approach making albums on Gigi. And it was great to go over to LA to his environment. You know, we did the last one in Paris, go over to his environment. And, you know, we already had that shared language together. We already had all of our inside jokes and stuff like that. So we could really just kind of settle into work straight away on day one. You know, there was no, there was no pissing around trying to get to know each other or whatever. So that was cool. And John is just a very he’s a very thoughtful and intriguing and oftentimes unexpected collaborator and producer, and he approaches it from a very blue collar kind of way of doing it. You know, he just sees it as work like he doesn’t kind of glorify it in too much of a way. But he still manages to find – he’s a very deep thinker as well, I think so he still manages to find a lot of the nuance and the sort of romantic side of what making albums can and should be. I think you know, because there’s a mysticism as well around making records, in some ways, you know, what comes out of you and what time and the energy in the room and all that stuff, just kind of human collaboration in general, you know? So, yeah, isn’t that some that’s important part of making a record for me, like, which was extremely present working with Flood (from When I have Fears) , and just had to, like, find my way into that with John?

I have perhaps a bit of a naïve question, but you are a wordy band, by which I mean that your music can sometimes feel like rocky poetry more than poetic rock. What comes first usually: the words or the music? or does this shift?
It’s, I would say it’s probably like 50/50, roughly, I don’t know. It’s definitely not like one or the other, you know, I often have the lyrics or poems, whatever you want to call them. Sometimes it feels like I’m writing a poem, you know, and then sometimes it feels like I’m very much working on lyrics. So, yeah, it’s hard to say. I do also really enjoy, like, just like improvising over the band in a jam, you know. And just seeing what comes out like that can be very, very fruitful way of finding thematic direction and lyrical direction, you know.

And so you mainly do the lyrics I understand?
Yeah, they’re all me.

Since we’re talking about the lyrics, I noticed that the word feeling is brought up many, many of the songs. And this is certainly an album that oozes feeling in no small quantity. How do you feel about this album as opposed to earlier work?
I should probably go get a get a thesaurus for the next one. If I’m probably using, using these words too many times.

No, not too many times, don’t worry. It’s mainly at the end of the album. I really noticed that there, and there is a song of course called that feeling.
I know, yeah, no, I actually noticed that as well. And then I was like, our first thing that was ‘Feeling fades’. I’m like, what am I trying to express here? You know, what am I? So, yeah, just funny. This is kind of the music I’ve always wanted to make, man, you know, it’s kind of got that, like some Velvet Underground influences, Brian Johnson influences running through it. This is just like this, the shit I listen to, basically. So I’m just very, very, very much into this record, you know, I love it like I can’t wait to play it live. I can’t wait to find those light moments throughout it. I can’t wait to, you know, find the better vocal deliveries that frustrate me forever that they’re not on the record. I can’t wait to just tour the world with it. And like, yeah, I just, I fucking love this record. Honestly, that’s kind of where I’m at. I mean, it’s, it’s kind of cool. It’s cool to talk to you today as well, because it’s gonna be, it’s gonna be out in like, 12 hours, yeah, 13 hours in Ireland. And it’ll get sooner, actually, where you are.

For sure, although I’ve had the chance, of course, to listen to it, and I have to say it’s my favourite record of yours so far.
That’s nice, man, thanks. It’s just, I think it’s kind of, the funny thing is, like, I’ve obviously heard it as well myself, but, like, it just kind of changes how you hear it when, you know, the rest of the world can hear it too. It’s an interesting thing. You just feel sort of, I don’t know, maybe the sort of like peaks of excitement that I get throughout the record, they’re kind of like magnified in that moment, because you’re sort of wondering, you know, is there, like, I don’t know. The ultimate thought, I think, when it comes to like, you know, as much as you want, like everyone to fucking be into, or whatever, but the ultimate thought is, like the idea of, a 14 or 15 year old kid get in their bedroom, finding something, like finding your music, and then that giving them the kind of moments that music gave you as a teenager, you know, because that’s just like the most intensified way that music connects with the human being, it’s at that age, you know.

I’ve got one more big question. On your album so far, there is quite a lot of doom and gloom on your in your music, and I don’t want to give the impression that your music leaves one depressed, because it doesn’t. But still, I was wondering, would you say that you’re a doom thinker?
Hahahaha. Negativity bias is like, you know, it’s obviously a huge component of, like, the human psyche in general, and we can all see that, you know. My straight up answer would be no, honestly. I think I’m a pretty hopeful person. I think that I’m probably more obsessed with what’s beautiful in the world then you know what’s wrong with this. So I wouldn’t count myself as a cynic. I think I try to remain sort of balanced in my cynicism, and when it comes to the darker thoughts, I’m just not afraid to explore them. You know, I think one of the most kind of confusing and absurd things to me is how much people today, or how many people today, seem to sort of have this sort of belief that they’re morally above others, and that they live this sort of perfect life, and they never do anything wrong or think anything wrong or, you know. All this is total bullshit, like, you know, I think we’re all human beings, and we all have a, you know, we would all, I think, are. Born, endeavouring to be good, and then things happen to us or whatever. And, yeah, we all have a dark side, you know, in some way. You know, it doesn’t have to be like violent, you know, it can just be like thoughts or things or whatever. I don’t know. It’s just we’re complex, you know. So, no, I wouldn’t say, I wouldn’t say that my thoughts are sort of enveloped in sadness or darkness or whatever. I’ll just say that I’m a human, you know.

Well, thank you for the interview. I have a small question remaining: Where can we see you perform the album live this year? And when will you start performing?
Oh, shit. Well, you can see us like, kind of everywhere and anywhere. I think we’re playing the first, like record store show today. And yeah, the tour starts li in Japan in end of March. We’re doing Japan, Australia and New Zealand, and then we’ll come back to the UK, I think, in April, and then end of April, roughly, we’ll be coming through Europe for a few weeks so, and then you can see us at the festivals, and you can only be coming through wherever you are, right?

The Murder Capital Tour:
08.05.25 Backstage, München
10.05.25 Gretchen, Berlin
11.05.25 Gebäude 9, Köln