In Conversation with The Murder Capital: No words have lost meaning here for upcoming album Blindness
Image Credit: Hugo Comte
Millie Cain chats to The Murder Capital’s Cathal Roper discussing their forthcoming 3rd album, their tour with Nick Cave, and independent record stores.
Blindness, The Murder Capital’s stormy 3rd album opens with an older track, ‘Moonshot’, that Cathal described as a “wall of sound, it wasn’t a song we had worked on really. James already had played it on acoustic – we wanted to open the record with a drop on the needle. Gigi [2nd Album, Gigi’s Recovery (2023)] is very cinematic, with a lot of world building in that. A lot of our fave records you press play and it just starts right – and ‘Moonshot’ really does that.”
Ahead of Blindness’ 21st February release, they’ve released 3 singles, most standout being ‘Words Lost Meaning’. “Gabe had the bassline, he was having an argument with his girlfriend at the time and came out with that and it just so happened that when James put lyrics down that it was in the same vein – weird coincidence. We wrote that in Dublin, and it didn’t change much except the 3rd verse, with building guitars. It felt like a single straight away, the others weren’t as clear. ‘Words Lost Meaning’ felt like it was going to do what a single has to do.”
Huge anticipation awaits their forthcoming tour, starting with record shops up and down the UK, then a headline April tour. This is off the back of The Murder Capital’s coveted support slot touring with Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds at the end of last year. “Nick Cave – it was lovely, we got to have dinner with him one night, very nice and honest man, pretty funny. He’s an incredible performer, and we got to perform songs from Blindness that we hadn’t played.”
In terms of Blindness as an album, The Murder Capital have taken a step away from the concentrated structure of Gigi’s Recovery (2023). ”Gigi’s was heavily demoed, and Blindess was less so, honestly it was done on purpose. Gigi didn’t really grow much in the studio from what we already had, getting together with John [Congleton] we wanted to go to the studio and all the songs to change and grow. Things were so rigid with Gigi – we wanted that growth.”
“It honestly feels like funnily enough a merge of the first 2 records, there was such a reaction to the first one that we didn’t want to do anything to the first one, we were almost insecure about it representing all of us. And Gigi’s was so cinematic and world building that we missed the urgency of the first record, but we missed the texture. Blindness is more confident, self assured, in ourselves and our sound and makes the first record make a bit more sense too.”
“We had rehearsals last week for these instores, we played ‘Moonshot’ together for the first time. We had all recorded it separately on the last day of recording and it was all mixed together by John, so it was really good to see it come together.”
Alongside the Record Store Tour, The Murder Capital are hitting tons of independent venues in April, including the Brudenell on the 21 and 22nd. In terms of focusing on these venues, Cathal relayed how they chose the stops for their tour with “a conversation between us and our agent, I love the Brudenell. Nathan who runs it always really looks after us too so we’re so excited to play there again.”
A favourite on the album for Cathal is ‘Train On The Wing’. “I’m excited for people to hear it, it’s a more laid back song and more of the sort of stuff I’ve been playing since I was 16, and ‘Swallow’ as well. The guitar work there is an Irish traditional approach I went for – yeah I’m just really happy with how it turned out.”
Blindness itself was a theme of the record “it feels like a good word for all the topics that are discussed on the records. How do we encompass these? It’s generally about introspection, looking inside yourself, what makes the decisions and reactions you have and how that manifests itself out in the world. It’s a focus on your peripheral vision, the abstract of the everyday and blindness felt like the perfect word for that.”
For album 3, The Murder Capital leant into their influences of The Cure and The Velvet Underground. “James was really into a phase of Suicide (1977), for myself I was listening to a lot of Big Thief. I love Adrianne Lenker and everything she does. And this great record by Cameron Winter called Heavy Metal – that record he did is incredible, it has me in tears a lot of the time. That song ‘Drinking Age’ is probably one of the best songs – I really hope that record blows up more.” As do we, as Heavy Metal was certainly a standout 2024 album, if not a generational one.
The Murder Capital’s 3rd Album Blindness will be available on Friday 21st February 2025, and will be on tour at Brudenell 21st & 22nd April 2025.
Written by Millie Cain
