There’s something sacred about a debut record; it can be a pristine burst of unfiltered emotion tethered through every song, lyric, chord — a raw confession of the self or selves, even if those emotions are hesitant, anxious, and weary about the world they inhabit. For many acts, that first album stands unshackled, for better or worse, pure in its immediacy before the weight of expectation and overthinking can settle in. In the case of Dublin’s own The Murder Capital, their debut When I Have Fears was precisely that — a fierce and honest outpouring that lit up every note and word spoken. But then came the daunting task of a sophomore effort. By contrast, though warmly embraced by critics, follow-up Gigi’s Recovery felt like an overcooked stew of introspection, a record that rethought its own infant pulse, drowning its bright-eyed immediacy in cautious murkiness. It was complex, layered and necessitated close attention, but it didn’t have the primitive jolt or unfiltered thrill that surged through When I Have Fears.
And now, here we have Blindness, the band’s third offering, a defiant make-or-break bid to recapture that raw, sacred spark. Now scattered across the UK and Europe, the band has sprinted back toward that initial fire that had devolved to a mere light at the end of the tunnel. Through this tunnel, with vision obscured and heart weighing heavy as the world continues to crumble inward, they’ve trusted their gut, discarding overanalysis in favor of a visceral truth that roars from every riff and every lyric. In doing so, Blindness feels like both an exhale and an exorcism – a cathartic release of pent-up frustration, a forceful pruning of overwroughtness, and a banishing of that creeping doubt that plagues all young artists, which, for The Murder Capital, was especially threatening during a period marked by exhaustive touring and some expected internal friction. But their unyielding directness would not be blunted.
In their refusal to let songs be anything other than how they exist in the moment, at conception, Blindness declares its existence with haste; it doesn’t ask for permission nor waits to say what it wants. You feel this within Blindness’s first seconds through the opener, “Moonshot”, where the band sets a brutal pace by throwing listeners into disarray amid shrapnel of drums cracking with violence and purpose, beating forward with a determined force. At the same time, guitars clash, creating a sense of urgency that demands all attentive ears, while James McGovern’s vocals, raw and uncompromising, demand release. This track signals that Blindness is no mere continuation of their past sound, nor is it an overelaborate retread into Gigi’s Recovery; it’s an evolution of that virgin anger and creativity that still resides within. Unbothered with hesitation, it’s an immediate, chaotic eruption of a moment too potent to be tamed.
But what then, is an explosion without the calm that precedes it and the sullen devastation that follows? The Murder Capital, more than most bands within this new wave of post-punk and adjacent art-rock popularity, know better than to pummel without reprieve. On Blindness, there is always space carved out for this quiet — for the moments where the weight of all that noise crashes down and leaves only a hush. After the relentless, turbulent surge of gut-fueled punk embraced on tracks like “The Fall” and the liberatory outburst of “Death of A Giant”, the meditative “Swallow” eases the growing tension and commotion into an almost spectral stillness. Here, guitars murmur in vast, empty spaces, looping hypnotically as if trying to coax a truth from the silence – a fragile space where grief and exhaustion lie side by side.
Even on “Love of Country,” a track steeped in the righteously apathetic critique of patriotism, there’s room for candid reflection – a conversation between the individual and the cultural narratives that dictate what we’re told to see, hear, and believe. The weight of national ideologies and inherited history can feel suffocating, but The Murder Capital slice through the confusion with sharp calmness and introspective poetry. Phrases like “Could you blame a soul for livin’ in a world built to escape?” or “I’m just a kid reachin’ out to daydreams from a few pots of this land,” though both delivered with weary resolve, aren’t the kind of lyrics to be merely heard and pondered — they’re words you want to tattoo across your fucking chest if you’ve ever felt dejected and lost in a world that demands conformity as it brutalizes the innocent.
Blindness, then, understands something fundamental about punk: it isn’t merely about blasting volume into the void; it’s about knowing when to scream and when to pull back, letting a song draw something raw from within you — not through force, but through the natural intuition of what the heart knows and feels to be true and beautiful.
Listening to Blindness feels like standing at the edge of something vast and unknowable, where instinct takes over and calculation fades away. It’s a record that captures The Murder Capital at their most raw and uncompromising – alive in the turbulence, unafraid of what lies within and around them. In this space between certainty and chaos, they’ve realized something vital and profoundly human – that sometimes, to truly see, you must close your eyes and trust your gut because something true, beautiful, and ferocious might lie within.
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