The Murder Capital play Brighton ahead of second album release

Return My Head, which came out recently, was the last single to land ahead of the album Gigi’s Recovery. Gabriel Paschal Blake is promising an album of hope.

“We are an Irish band. Our first rehearsal space was in Dublin so you could definitely say that's where we started but we are from all over Ireland. There are five of us and we were all playing in Dublin at some time. We just found that we had a mutual appreciation of music and three of them were playing together and then I came along and another came along and that would have been around about the summer of 2018. Our first festival was something like May 2018 and so we had a while before the pandemic happened.

"It was nine months from first meeting together to putting out the first record so we managed to get quite a lot done in a fairly short time. And then we had the pandemic. We were two shows into a six-week tour of America and we had to down everything pretty quickly but in a way it has paid dividends.

"We were not a band that had been together for terribly long beforehand so in some ways the pandemic was a great opportunity to get to understand each other and know each other. It's a bit like that film Lost In Translation. It is not necessarily the length of time that you spend with somebody in your life that is the most significant or important thing. You can meet somebody for just two days or less than that, just really briefly in your life and it can be a really big impact. So what I mean really is that we had that chance to spend a lot of intense time together and I think that really helped us as a band especially coming into the second album.

"It was just the five of us together. The writing was in summer of 2020 and we recorded it last April. We were able to lunge forward so quickly because we'd spent so much time together in such an intense way.

“I think with album number two in many ways the process was quite similar with what we were trying to do. We were trying to project and get out our feelings into the medium so there are big similarities for both, and that’s one of the reasons it sounds so different, the fact that we were feeling such different things at the time. It ended up sounding a very very different album to the first one.

"I think some people that stayed with us from the first album will be expecting the second one to be almost like a replication of that first album sounds and it isn't. The second album is a lot less angry and there is a lot more hope on it. The record believes that things can get better and in fact over time things have got better. Really it's just like life in general. With the first record we wanted to give the full range of human emotion and we definitely managed to do that in so many different ways but this new record is a lot more about hope and about moving forward. As I said, it is just like life. Once you decide that you're going to hang around you've got to take the opportunity of giving it your best shot. And I think once you stop feeling so sorry for yourself and you realise that a lot of humanity is going through difficult things, even tougher than what we were going through, then you can turn it around and be much more positive.

“We had this amazing thing happening with the band before the pandemic. It was so positive. It was something that I had always wanted to do, to be in a band.

"It was something that we worked so hard towards for such a long time and we were making it happen but then the pandemic just came along and took it all away but then at the same time the pandemic in a way gave us some time to think and to breathe and to engage with each other and I think that's what this record reflects.”