Last year, way back in frigid January, The Murder Capital released breakout album Gigi’s Recovery, a weathered and scarred record of gritty wisdom that exposed a raw underbelly of Irish post-punk. With the album still in heavy rotation from here to Dublin, James McGovern and the boys have now clocked in on 2024 with “Can’t Pretend To Know,” an incendiary crack of the whip that further illuminates the group’s neon grayscale sound.
Recorded in Los Angeles with producer John Congelton (St Vincent, Angel Olsen, Sharon Van Etten), “Can’t Pretend To Know” twists and aches through it’s sub-three-minute runtime with a primal urgency. There’s clarity in the back-alley sound of The Murder Capital that places it in a different lane than the band’s peers, and that mood swirls here with a captivating type of tension that is never guaranteed to experience a forgiving release.
“‘Can’t Pretend To Know’ is a whip of a tune that we made to feel like a hurricane of color and breathlessness,” McGovern reveals. “A surreal look at childhood innocence and all its replacers, those delicate bridges we burn as we move through the strangeways of our youth. Molded by everything we come into contact with. Learning lessons from toys. Playing the parts that are asked of us.”
The Murder Capital are set to hit the road in Europe supporting Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, and set off on some UK, Australian, and New Zealand dates. Word is a North American tour is arriving soon, and in the meantime, we’ll never forget how the band’s March 2020 show in Somerville was our last good time out before the entire world shit the bed.