'We were partying then struck by personal grief'

James McGovern and Damien Tuit of The Murder Capital speak to Louis Chilton about their new album, going from the studio to a funeral and an LA fight that nearly ended it all

- Louis Chilton

"Are we intense?" asks Damien "Irv" Tuit, before he and his bandmate, James McGovern, explode into laughter. The men two-fifths of the Irish rock outfit The Murder Capital - are sitting with me in an east London pub, and have just talked me through their origin story. “I played with ‘Pump’ [guitarist Cathal Roper] first,” McGovern, the singer of the group, recalls. “Irv came to see us at a show and was, you know, enticed by the fucking audacity of me.” Reflecting on the creation of their breakthrough album, 2019’s raw and acclaimed debut When I Have Fears, he notes that it was recorded in a “six-week odyssey of chaos and beauty”. That is to say, yes – these guys are somewhat on the intense side.

Then again, this will hardly be news to anyone who’s au fait with The Murder Capital’s back catalogue. The Dublin-formed band – also comprising Gabriel “G” Paschal Blake on bass and Diarmuid Brennan on drums – have never really concerned themselves with frivolity. When I Have Fears was described by The Guardian as “lavishly poetic [and] intensely dour” and drew (somewhat reductive) comparisons to contemporaries such as Idles and fellow Dubliners Fontaines DC. The album was recorded in the aftermath of a friend’s suicide, as well as the death of Blake’s mother. “We were partying heavily at the time, in a new environment, and then we were stricken by a ton of personal grief,” says McGovern. “We left that studio to go carry Gabe’s mum’s coffin... and then a couple of days later Gabe came back to start recording. It was a really, really mad time.”

McGovern, 30, and Tuit, 27, are, nonetheless, in good spirits today, grabbing a breather between studio rehearsals. They’re speaking to me ahead of the release of Blindness, the band’s third album, following the enthusiastically received