Melancholic For The Troops

Channy Leaneagh is looking forward to bringing her band, Poliça, back to Ireland. After her last visit here, she feels she is owed a little good luck. “We played Castlepalooza and the gig itself was great – there was a double rainbow! Unfortunately, my daughter had brought home a bug from school and I caught pneumonia. I never felt so shit. A really great doctor in Dublin helped me and it was fantastic seeing my first Irish castle. But I was extremely ill.”

I joke that Leaneagh can at least empathise with Hillary Clinton and her recent bout of pneumonia. However, it turns out Leaneagh isn’t necessarily the universe’s biggest Hilary Clinton fan. As with any self-respecting left of centre voter in the United States she was massively in the tank for the populist Bernie Sanders. That Clinton, rather than Sanders, is Democratic nominee is, she feels, due in no small part to establishment skulduggery.

“Look at what happened after it was disclosed that the Democratic National Convention had been working to purposefully hinder Sanders from getting the nomination,” says Leaneagh, from her home in Minneapolis. “It was a conspiracy. And yet, when the emails leaked, all anyone cared about was Donald Trump asking the Russians to continue with the hacking. There was this huge scandal – and the media completely ignored it.”

She’s happy taking Poliça back to Europe for a tour in October – it will get her out of the United States just as the most batshit crazy White House election in living memory reaches its boiling point.

“The press has created a circus,” she says. “From the start they’ve given Donald Trump all of this coverage. It feels like such a shitshow over here. Trump has brought so much bigotry and racism into the campaign – his supporters really need to read a book and figure out that their way of thinking is out of sync with reality.”

Pneumonia and Donald Trump aside, life is pretty great for Leaneagh right now. Where Poliça’s 2012 debut, Give You The Ghost, was informed by the end of her marriage and torrid follow up Shulamith was a meditation on romantic betrayal, new LP United Crushers chronicles a period of grace and cohesion in her life.

After years of feeling adrift she is now in a happy relationship with band-mate Ryan Olson, with whom she has a baby. Emotional stability is, it appears, rather a novelty for Leaneagh – United Crushers is about her making sense of the changes in her personal circumstances and wrestling with the fear of screwing it all up.

“Give You The Ghost was me singing about having failed in a relationship and how bad I felt about that,” she says. “I had caused hurt. With Shulamith, there was a break-up. I was cheated on by someone. There was a lot of anger there. Now I feel I am in a loving place in my life. I want to make sure it continues. There aren’t many celebratory songs on the record – it is more about me exploring my feelings and trying to hold onto what I have.”

She goes out of her way to emphasise that United Crushers is a personal album. Named after a left-wing graffiti crew in Minneapolis, the project has been received as a broadside against America’s reactionary underbelly. Yet the only properly political track, says Leaneagh, is ‘Wedding’, a bruising indictment of police violence against minorities (Minneapolis has the largest Somali community in the US and, for all its sleep Midwest reputation, is not immune to racism).

“United Crushers is about the things I’ve been going through in my life,” says Leaneagh. “I make a point of saying this. Yes, there are one or two political moments. That isn’t what the whole thing is about.”

Give You The Ghost was a critical and commercial success that led to Poliça playing one of their biggest ever headline shows at London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire (though the band have far warmer memories of a gig several days later at Whelan’s). But Shulamith was not as well reviewed, its simmering rawness in contrast to its predecessor’s stately melancholy. Ever since Leaneagh feels she has been on the receiving end of a backlash, especially in the United States. It’s cool – she never set out to be one of the cool kids. Haters are fine with her.

““We know we’re not going to get as much notice as we did with our first record. And who knows if that was even warranted,” she told me when we chatted earlier this year. “Our new album isn’t getting a lot of attention. It does cause you to reassess what you are doing. It’s not about impressing the cool people — it’s about making art. I could give a fuck about the critics.”

Leaneagh grew up in the Twin Cities and, simply by dint of her background, was hugely influenced local boy done well Prince. When he died, Minneapolis was united in grief.

“The first show I ever went to was a Prince concert,” she says.“I remember it clearly; I was eight years old. He put on a free gig for Special Olympics volunteers. To see someone from a humble background become one of the greatest performers of all time was very inspiring. Everyone in Minneapolis was enormously proud. We felt that it put us on the map musically.”

Poliça play the Button Factory, Dublin on October 15.