The Murder Capital
Blindness
Human Season Records [2025]
“Blindness sees The Murder Capital at their most urgent and electrifying—hook-driven, intense, and impossible to ignore.”
Album Overview: Since 2019 Dublin’s post-punks The Murder Capital have been creating an impressive music catalogue. Their first two albums, When I Have Fears and 2023’s Gigi’s Recovery, have garnered much acclaim from critics. The band has a knack for creating soundscapes that can bend and twist from abrasive noise, hard and heavy blasts, and tender, empathetic indie cues. While many bands do this, I feel The Murder Capital usually has the formula for engaging song craft in their sights. Gigi’s Recovery has the band playing fast and loose with expansive shoegaze and tonal changes within songs. Blindness to hear it straight from the band’s mouth when talking to Apple Music, “ We wanted to inject urgency and an energy back into the music again.” This is exactly what happened with Blindness.
Musical Style: The Murder Capital urges their listeners to take notice with a blistering post-punk tone. However, Blindness manages to incorporate more styles without sounding too superfluous. Robotic beats can be preceded with meat grinder riffs along with simplistically beautiful ballads that plink along. It all works to sound cohesive while being uniquely The Murder Capital.
Evolution of Sound: Blindness doesn’t necessarily sound like an evolution of sound. Blindness is more of a focus of sound. Like I said before, Gigi’s Recovery gets more expansive with its soundscapes. Blindness has that, but the band spends less time on experimentation and more time on building songs with hooks. In an interview the band said, “We stripped back our process completely to a whole different way of working.”
Artists with Similar Fire: The Murder Capital pulls influences from many artists. The most obvious are their contemporaries Fontaines D.C. A lot of other comparisons can be made towards the likes of both shame and Squid. Some influential surprises that jumped out at me are bands like Flaural (you need to listen), Metz, Preoccupations, Radiohead, The National, and At the Drive-In.
Pivotal Tracks: “Moonshot” charges right towards you as it bends and undulates into your ears. It’s a real grab you by the collar moment and it projects the band’s intent right at the start. “Words Lost Meaning” is a dark, slinking ballad that has James McGovern’s sneering chorus repeat “Oh, I never need you to days, “l love you. “The words lost meaning.” “Can’t Pretend to Know” kicks the band into a noise tunnel that has big Flaural energy. Album standout “Born Into The Fight” really goes Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde between Radiohead’s Kid A and a METZ chainsaw riff. It also helps that the subject matter has a truthfully haunting beauty. “Love of Country” wins with a simplistic beauty that really works for the message. It really just touches on turmoil in general. Starting the song off with the lyric “God’s in my position, make me wanna die,” is quite chilling, it’s some of the strongest songwriting on the album. “Death Of A Giant” puts the foot on the gas and really lets loose with a groovy prog riff that could be mistaken for something by At the Drive-In or even The Mars Volta.
Lyrical Strength: This has been one of the most lyrically interesting albums that I’ve heard so far this year. In these unprecedented and unknowing times The Murder Capital have written an album that touches on so many things. Patriotism, religion, death, and love to name a few. It’s cliché to say that this album is the human condition because isn’t that what a lot of art is supposed to portray? But it doesn’t hurt to say that here because the album can be quite weighty.
Final Groove: Coming off of Blindness, The Murder Capital recaptured the fervor of their debut When I Have Fears. It took an album of experimentation to then invite refinement into the band. That’s exactly what Blindness does. While it isn’t a reinvigorated leap for the genre, it is a reinvigorated leap for the band. The Murder Capital have delivered one of the year’s first truly great punk albums and the more you listen, the more you’ll agree!
THE MURDER CAPITAL REVIEW HISTORY
When I Have Fears (2019)
THE MURDER CAPITAL LINKS
Website | Facebook | Instagram | Bandcamp | Human Season Records
- The Murder Capital: Blindness [Album Review] - March 11, 2025
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