The Murder Capital on ‘Blindness’, touring worldwide and tracks that they hold near and dear

The Murder Capital. Photo credit: @olivevstheworld

Jordan Royal (Sonic Alien 4ZZZ) caught up with Gabriel and Diarmuid of The Murder Capital to chat about the writing and recording of their third studio album ‘Blindness’, touring around the world and some tracks that they hold near and dear.

Interview aired on Sonic Alien 4ZZZ 16 April 2025.

Jordan: I'm joined in the studio by Diarmuid and Gabriel from The Murder Capital. Thanks so much for trekking down to the station and coming into the studio, it's awesome to have you guys in here with me.

Gabriel: Thank you so much for having us, that's a crack.

Jordan: Of course, we were talking off air, and you mentioned that this is your first time in Australia, which is awesome, and you're playing tonight at The Brightside for your third studio album, Blindness. I want to kick things off by having a chat about the album because it's insane, it was written in six weeks, which is crazy, and I was wondering how that creative sprint felt for you guys.

Diarmuid: Well, the first couple of songs that really made the record were straight after the end, the last tour of our last album, Gigi's Recovery, so we were humming and hawing whether we go in and start writing for the third album in a serious way straight after that. It was around December time, so instead of winding down, we kind of just squeezed out the last bit of juice that we had left. So, I found that was two weeks in Dublin. I felt like that got us into the new year, hungry to keep writing, and then we wrote in Berlin for two weeks. I was living over there, and yeah, we got a little bit more done.

So, it was in these two weeks stints. It allowed us to have a little bit of time off away from each other, and then we were hungry for getting into the room and excited. It kept everything fresh. Rather than the album previously, it was during Covid, so we were locked away in a house down the country for nine months, trying to squeeze out. It's just a different way of working.

Gabriel: Yeah, James's dad, Aidan, actually gave us, when we were doing Gigi, he was such a good coach to us in different ways, because he's worked on amazing records, like he's worked with The Cranberries and stuff, and he just gives such sage advice. But yeah, like as Dee said, we played our very last show for the Gigi's Recovery campaign in Dingle at a festival in Ireland called Other Voices. We played our show in St James's Church, which is televised, and then it gets screened all around the pubs as if it's like a football game, but then the next day we actually played in a pub.

The Murder Capital. Photo credit: @ifucktokyo

Yeah, there was some feeling that I got of playing The Murder Capital songs in a pub setting, as if we were a pub band, and the whole place was packed out. There literally couldn't have been more people in the pub. There was just such a feeling of, right, okay, something new is happening. And then that was on the Saturday, we drove home to Dublin on the Sunday, and on Monday we were in Temple Lane Studios in Dublin, which is where we did the first two weeks.

Yeah, the Irish Rock and Roll History Museum is actually in the same complex as Temple Lane Studios. So, there'd be tours coming in throughout the day, and we'd be passing records of The Pogues, of Sinead O'Connor, of The Cranberries. I really felt the fact that we were Irish artists, and we had the opportunity to contribute to that.

Jordan: That's such a crazy whirlwind, because I read that you guys had sort of stopped touring, and then the day later you went in to start recording in Dublin. I was like, wow, that's insane. That's crazy.

But those two different experiences sound so completely end of the spectrum from one another, of going into the studio for two weeks and just smashing it out, versus the marathon of sort of being away. That's really interesting. Blindness, I mean you sort of touched on this in your answer a little bit, but it's a bit of a combination of your first two records, and you guys have spoken about taking a lot away from the first two records and applying it to Blindness. How did your experiences on the first two records change the way you approach Blindness?

Diarmuid: I think we were willing to let go of things, or learn how to let go of things, like minor details that we would stress about, and we would debate a topic when it comes to very minutiae details of songs, or how things sounded. It kind of got in the way of the process of just writing music, and playing music, and just letting a song be what it is, rather than trying to make it even better, that it's not enough. We need more ideas, or it needs to do this now, or it needs to feel this way now, or whatever. And when sometimes it's like, you can just save that for the next song, you know. Have the next song feel like that. 

Like the first album we had written, recorded that album within the first nine months, I think, of us all playing together. You know, there was a whole teething period that was happening within those first two albums, I think. And one of the best things we've had was getting John, who recorded the second album with us, produced it. He was very much, he kind of knows the band. He's worked with so many bands that he kind of knows them as this, kind of like a living entity of how they react. I think one of the best things he ever said was like, when we were debating something, maybe something so silly, like the tempo of a song or something. But, you know, we're debating it by numbers, or whatever. And then he'd be like, okay, I'm going to leave the room for 15 minutes. And when I come back, a decision is going to be made. And here's the spoiler, at least one of you is going to be not happy with the decision. And that was a great moment, because then it just gave, well, it gave me the permission anyway. I can't speak for everyone else, but just the hands off feeling of like, actually, not that it doesn't matter, but you can actually relinquish a lot of emotional baggage tied to decisions. And then you can use that, whatever emotion that would go into a decision, you can just put that into the music, which is, do you know what I mean? Like, you have so much emotional currency to give something.

Jordan: Yeah, I feel like that's such an amazing takeaway to take away from the first two records and apply it. It's like untangling this perfectionism in a certain sense, but this laborious perfectionism that at a certain point is really draining. 

I want to talk about the recording process as well. You all live in different cities, which I found really interesting. And so the record came together across different places in different cities like Berlin, London, Dublin, LA. Do you think that in any way, the character or atmosphere of these cities seeped into the record?

Gabriel: I don't know if it necessarily was with the writing for me, but I think the recording process was interesting because, like, I've dreamed of spending time in LA since I was a kid, just watching like Illegal Civilization skate videos and stuff, and just getting so obsessed with the atmosphere that I perceived to be over there. Yeah, I don't know. It's a pretty big dream to dream that you're going to record a record in LA, especially coming from small town Ireland. There's not a path towards that. Once we landed in LA, I definitely felt a bit of a swagger, because it was like, geez, we've actually managed to do this. We're all here. And we had like a week or so pre-production. What was it called? LA rehearsals?

Diarmuid: The place where...?

Gabriel: Yeah, where Styx was and all.

Diarmuid: Styx, yeah, there were a couple of lads just hanging about the studio. It was a proper run-down little studio place, which, you know, it doesn't matter what city you're in, there's always one of those places that we all tend to just rehearse in.

Gabriel: But this one was an anomaly in that there were no locks on the doors and we were understandably concerned being in a new city with no locks on the doors with our gear. But Styx was just like, no, don't worry about it, it's on the set. There's nobody that's going to be touching that gear.

Diarmuid: He kind of sat on a beer crate outside the side door and was just like, oh, I'm going to be here. And he was just smoking joints.

Gabriel: That feeling of swagger, or that feeling of being affirmed in what we were doing, affirmed in what we had achieved, was also quite sobering because I was like ok, I really realised we had this really amazing opportunity to be working with John in his new studio in Los Angeles. If you had told me that when I was a teenager, not that I wouldn't have believed it, but I was like, oh my God, you've managed to work it out exactly the way that you wanted to. 

But yeah, in a writing sense, especially Dublin, Death of a Giant wouldn't be written the way it was if we hadn't been in Dublin. Writing Love of Country, I don't know if the lyrics were there before we went into that session, but I think one's environment inevitably comes into that, you know?

Jordan: Yeah, absolutely. Love of Country—those lyrics, I had to take a step back. They are so impactful. Those lyrics are something else. 

Something that I really admire about you guys is that you don't shy away from political and social issues and you actively tackle them in your music. I think that it's amazing to see, especially in Blindness. Why do you guys think that music remains such a powerful tool for confronting injustice?

Diarmuid: I feel sometimes when in the world, it sounds cliché, but we all feel kind of powerless to a lot of the affairs that are going on, a lot of the injustices that we see every time we open our phone. I mean, from our point of view, we just see any issues that are just humanity issues that just need to be addressed. It's not about taking sides or anything like that or using power music or whatever. We just happen to be musicians and we happen to have some sort of platform. It feels like I think now you can't really ignore a lot of things in the world. You're doing yourself an injustice by ignoring a lot of the problems, and then it's just a bit of a vicious loop. I suppose we released Love of Country, one of the songs, as a seven-inch and all the proceeds went to medical aid for Palestine. That was just a very small gesture compared to the amount of other groundwork that people are doing. It was just our way of trying to do what we could with what we can do.

Gabriel: On from what Dee was saying, I think another part of what I felt when we were starting Blindness in Dublin, Sinéad O'Connor is a huge hero for us in the band. This conversation comes up a lot because there's a lot of Irish artists in particular speaking out for Palestine and speaking out for human rights in general. A question comes up, is there a lot of pressure as an Irish artist to do that? It's a difficult one to answer, but as Dee says, we can only answer for what it feels like for ourselves. Following in the footsteps of Sinéad, she was completely ostracised from the music industry, from the entertainment industry, from America after she spoke about the abuses in the Catholic Church on SNL. Her bravery changed the course of perception and the familial trance of nobody in Ireland is allowed to call out a priest and nobody in Ireland is allowed to call out anybody that has to do with the church. She, for speaking up, was bullied.

When we have Irish artists before us like that, I don't think it's an external pressure. I don't honestly feel like we have an external pressure as a band in any way other than to create music for each other. The five of us have a commitment to each other to be in the band and to have each other's back and make it the music that we want to make, but it just so happens that internally we can't not speak about these things. Before we released a single, we were campaigning for the marriage rights referendum and the repeal referendum in Ireland and we can try, but frankly we have no idea how to—like, we're not social media experts, do you know what I mean? What we have is art and it's a difficult one because we as artists don't want to be speaking for anyone. It's all about raising the voices of the people who are actually going through the persecution. It's just so clear for us that you don't have to figure out the right thing to say all the time. As long as you say something, as long as you try to give some help, as long as you try to direct attention to it, as long as you try to raise the voices of the Palestinian people. But it's a tricky one because at the same time I don't think that every Irish person or any person in general that picks up a guitar has to become an activist.

Jordan: Thank you so much for that answer and the insight that you provided in that answer as well. I think as you said, everyone has a responsibility to speak up for these issues and they are world issues. I think that the insight you guys provide in your art and in your music is really impactful and really important, so thank you so much for speaking on that.

You guys have such a strong Irish identity in your music, but you’ve been extensively touring and spending a lot of time away from home. Is there any place that feels like it connects with the themes of Blindness or was just a really unexpected connection to place that you had?

Diarmuid: I mean, we were just playing Tokyo last week. I found that a very interesting place to play those songs. People seemed to be into it.

Gabriel: In a way to answer the question, I was just so surprised that we went to Tokyo and people were completely connected with it. Especially—well, shout out Eric Cherry and Hiero, our promoters down there. They really, really looked after us. The same was Adam and everybody who's working with us in New Zealand and Australia. But yeah, the fact that we're literally on the other side of the world—if we went any further, we'd start coming back—and people are connecting with the new record. It's mad that the things we're writing about seem to be connecting.

Jordan: Yeah, it must be really surreal—as you said, as far away from home as you can be—and there are people that are so excited to see you guys and so into it. I mean, Australia is definitely the same. I'm so excited to see you guys.

Diarmuid: We had a fun night in Melbourne last night.

Jordan: Melbourne would have been sick. Yeah, it was great.

Diarmuid: We were in the Corner Hotel.

Jordan: The last question before I wrap up is that the album dropped over a month ago. You guys have been relentlessly touring. Has there been a particular song on Blindness that has taken a different form or a different life in a live setting for you guys?

Diarmuid: Swallow. We've been playing that. Last night it felt pretty rock and roll.

The Murder Capital. Photo credit: @olivevstheworld

Gabriel: Yeah, it was good.

Diarmuid: I was baiting the drums into it.

Gabriel: You played such good drums last night. You were spanking them tubs, bro.

Diarmuid: He's telling me I'm spanking the tubs. He's telling me real nice as well.

Gabriel: It's funny, I'm glad that I don't have a mic on stage because I was probably like, Jesus Christ, because he's just playing the drums so good last night.

Jordan: Some ad libs here and there.

Diarmuid: Well, Swallow has been a tricky one because we've stripped it back a lot live, which I find quite scary because I really love the way that song lives on record. But yeah, last night in Melbourne—I have to give it to Australia—the sing-along aspects of that song and the hope we had of stripping it back so that there was more emphasis on the melody and the sing-along factors of that song, I think were achieved last night.

Diarmuid: Yeah, I think it's a good example of the writing process of this album. Just like, what is the song? Instead of all the bells and whistles—even though we love bells and we love whistles.

Jordan: We love bells and whistles.

Diarmuid: We want to bring all the bells and whistles to Brisbane and everywhere.

Gabriel: Go Go Bells, to be specific.

Diarmuid: Go Go Bells as well—that didn't make it over to Australia. They're not on a distant life live at the moment. But anyway, that is one of those songs that's changed form, but it's also kind of intuitive with how we've been writing. Just following our gut and just getting that feeling out, you know.

Jordan: Yeah, well thank you guys so much for trekking down to the station and coming in the studio and having a chat. It's been awesome. Thank you guys so much.

Listen to ‘Blindness’ below.