‘Elon Musk is dangerous and crazy. And I kind of used to like him’: Interpol on their political awakening – and making their masterpiece
They were a big 00s buzz band – but looked in danger of fading out. Empowered by fatherhood and anger at war and AI, the New Yorkers explain why they ‘really showed up’ again
Suits. Gnomic poetry. Moody, insistent riffs. It used to be that you’d know what to expect from NYC rockers Interpol. The band’s first two albums, in the early 00s, were blockbuster successes, shifting half a million units each thanks to dramatic songs also fit for jerking around at an indie disco. Interpol duly jumped up to a major label, but then quickly fell back down again. Their talismanic bassist Carlos Dengler quit, and the band settled into a decade of solidly successful but pretty predictable albums. The most recent, 2022’s The Other Side of Make Believe, only reached No 178 on the US charts.
So it’s a bit unexpected that their upcoming eighth album, This Mirror Weighs a Ton, is their masterpiece. “We just all really showed up,” frontman-guitarist Paul Banks says of a band that has swelled to a quintet as two touring musicians, bassist Brad Truax and keyboardist Brandon Curtis, become full-time members. “The lyrics on the last record, it’s really hard for me to identify with what I was doing,” Banks continues. “I felt as if I made some mistakes.” What were they? “I don’t want to draw attention to them! I just didn’t want to walk away with that feeling again.”
The indie disco hits are back – Wake Up even shimmies to the sound of bongos – and the rest of the album has a vast emotional and tonal depth, aided by producer Andrew Wyatt, who won an Oscar for co-writing A Star is Born’s Shallow, co-created the zeitgeist-dominating Barbie film soundtrack and worked on Rosalía’s Lux. There’s a trip-hoppish opener, jazz-fusion synth soloing, everything from xylophones to woodwind and, in Enemy, the rare sound of a rock band making a brilliant piano ballad. As well as the intimate human dramas of old, the lyrics confront the inferno of our contemporary moment, from war in Ukraine to AI.
Banks makes for wonderful company at lunch in a central London hotel, with long, searching ruminations about his work plus the occasional peppery aside: “You ever see Fawlty Towers?” he says sotto voce after a bumbling waiter leaves. “It’s giving Manuel.” He’s visiting from Berlin, where he lives with his fashion designer wife Juliet Seger and two young children. His hair has some rumpled edges but he still wears a smart shirt collar under his dad-core pullover. “Having children, to me, is maximum fulfilment,” he says. “Having this being that feels so safe that they fall asleep in your arms, it’s just so powerful and beautiful. And if I’m going to have a job that keeps me away from my family sometimes, then I don’t want any mediocre work. I feel this responsibility of being a better version of myself.”
But, he says, “the wish to feel complete, I don’t think anything can really fix that. As a younger man, I was thinking it would be via love. Now I think you need more than that.”
nterpol were always the most melancholic of their peers in the 00s NYC scene that spawned the Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and LCD Soundsystem. Back then, “through longing and loneliness, I found a way to bring my sadness up a little bit, by being creative”, Banks says. “It takes struggle and suffering to make an artist want to create. The other thing is that it’s really fun.”
Daniel Kessler, who I speak to later that day over the phone from New York, feels the same way. “When I am writing stuff” – Interpol songs almost invariably start life with a Kessler chord progression – “it’s like: if I don’t do this, I’ll be miserable, and something could be become repressed in me. Being in the band, writing music together, it definitely exorcises angst, moodiness, depression. It’s visceral.”
Kessler says Interpol sat apart from those other 00s buzz bands: “This camaraderie, this CBGB sort of scene of everyone being in the same place, that wasn’t happening for us.” But despite Kessler feeling “very shy in social situations, the same sort of shyness I felt when I was a little kid”, he and the band weren’t moping in the corner. “We were debauched, for sure. Definitely decadent. Carlos was very good with this stuff: what’s the next thing to do after the gig? It was fun in a way I don’t think would exist now.” Why not? “Social media,” he says, presumably meaning that you can no longer party in private. “And even the way people choose restaurants now: they examine what they’re going to order before they go. I will romanticise New York in that [early-00s] time period: unbelievable nights would happen because you were just going with the moment.” For Banks, New York was, and is, “a ley line of creativity, a chakra point of human force – it supercharges you”.
This group of emotional young men inevitably had their ructions: the departed Dengler has described having PTSD. Were there moments of serious tension? Banks drops his voice into a low, harrowed register. “Yeah. Yeah. The years before Carlos’s departure, and then on and off since then. There’s who you think you want people to be – and then there’s who they are.”