A few weeks ago a music writer on Twitter hit the nail on the head with his New Year’s resolution to stop mentioning the influence of Covid when writing about new albums.
True, it’s become the box-ticking question for most interviews these days, and the pandemic won’t disappear from the discourse for years.
But even the biggest aloof muso contrarian couldn’t avoid the pandemic cloud hanging over The Murder Capital’s new album Gigi’s Recovery.
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Drummer Diarmuid Brennan says the band were “angry, almost grieving” when they started writing their second album during lockdown in 2020, and the record they thought they would wrap up really quickly “took the guts of 18 months”.
That feeling of grief and derailment hit while the Dublin band were only a few months into touring their 2019 debut album When I Have Fears — an intense, atmospheric record that channelled Joy Division and Nick Cave, and excited critics in Ireland and overseas.
After their second US date in New York in March 2020 the pandemic pause button zapped them back down to Earth, and back to Ireland just as they were taking off.
The band wrote and recorded When I Have Fears really quickly, but album two wasn’t so immediate, with two drawn-out lockdown residential writing periods in Wexford and Donegal.
“We were a bit defeated, but our main focus was, we're here to write music together,” says Brennan over the phone from the band’s rehearsal space in London.
“We thought it'd be finished within three months, by the end of summer 2020… but it was harder the second time around. The first time we kind of just met each other and recorded the album within nine months of knowing each other, we just banged it out.
"How we got to know each other was on tour playing in a band very intensely, but then once that's all taken away, we were kind of left to get to know each other in the writing room. It’s hard then to communicate properly… introspection is almost a theme of the album, where you're at with other people, the people close to you.”
Frontman James McGovern has shared his own abstract thoughts on the idea of the Recovery that’s referenced in the album title, and Diarmuid has his own personal take.
“Within recovery there's a lot of introspection,” he says. “Recovery is like coming back with a different version of yourself, not fully back to where you were before. You're not fully healed, you've just recovered.
“There was so much downtime for us just to be in our own heads, and thinking about our own past filters into the room and changes the energy.”
The extended time together gave them a chance to let ideas take left turns and open up new levels of experimentation. On first listen, Gigi’s Recovery isn’t as raw and abrasive as their debut, but the intensity builds in layers. On one hand, the single Return My Head is a sure-fire encore calling track, with an anthemic quality that recalls The Walkmen’s hall-of-fame song The Rat. Meanwhile, The Stars Will Leave Their Stage sounds like a skeletal, paranoid fever dream from Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor.
“I guess we had time to explore different textures, the basis for a new spectrum of sounds,” says Diarmuid. “The lads got new synths and electronic equipment and samplers, pedal boards. There's just infinite possibilities that come out of that. And behind the drums that can be really inspiring, you can complement things and jump off things rhythmically in interesting ways.”
Diarmuid said he struggled with putting the album to bed after extensive layering and shapeshifting over the writing period, and recalls one setback that knocked him off course: “In September 2021 we were three months into London after being in the Irish countryside for the guts of the year.
"We didn't have a full album but our earlier ideas had been finished, thinking, yeah, we're kind of on the right track, then we reached out to our management and and they were like, ‘I think this sets a new standard for depression’, which definitely was a bit of a roadblock in our heads.”
Thankfully their producer John Congleton (Franz Ferdinand, Swans, Lana Del Rey) convinced them they’d demoed the songs enough, and the unsure feeling “might not go away until the last week of recording… I took so much solace in that and we rehearsed one more time in Slane Castle and that's when it was like ‘yes, we got this’.”
From rural Ireland then London, the band shifted mood to the idyllic residential La Frette Studios in Paris, in the recording shadow of greats like Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and Arctic Monkeys.
“It was a great experience, my first time ever staying in a residential studio,” recalls Diarmuid. “I ended up reading a lot of French comic books. There was a moment where I had the drum set up in the same place as Tranquillity Base Hotel and Casino [Arctic Monkeys’ recording], but then when you're actually there, you're looking into a moment in the past, it's not here in front of you... but definitely I think we just made it our own.
“It's quite a picturesque place with these beautiful houses all along the hills, going for runs along the Seine.”
Paris made such an impact on Brennan that he moved there for a while, and it feels more of a spiritual home than London at the minute: “London can be isolating because it’s a big sprawling city, and my friends here have salary jobs. To me now it feels like a ‘business city’, not a culture city. I’ve got friends who’ve moved to Berlin saying, ‘Why did I not do this years ago?’
“Dublin too, it’s just harder and harder to live there anymore, it’s just shameful carry on… and that’s the thing, it just carries on and on for years, it never stops, it stops getting worse and worse.”
After a series of acoustic in-store gigs to mark the album launch, The Murder Capital start touring properly again in London next week, with gigs in mainland Europe and Dublin’s Vicar Street in February.
Then they’ll finally get back to the US to finish what they started, with 15 dates, including two weekends at Coachella in California, the world’s most famous music festival.
“I've never been to the west coast of America, so I really want to travel across the country in a van,” says Diarmuid. “It's always something that you kind of dream about… I'm kind of thinking what Steinbeck books do I read? How many Cormac McCarthy books am I gonna bring with me?
“But really, I'm not putting too much thought into actually going over. Because you know what happened last time. Yeah, I'm just gonna enjoy it as it comes.”
Gigi’s Recovery is out now.
The Murder Capital play Vicar Street Dublin on February 26.
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