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Ssmoke. Gnomic Poems. Moody, persistent riffs. If only you knew what to expect from a rocker in NYC Interpol. The band’s first two albums, in the early 00’s, were huge hits, shifting half a million units each thanks to catchy songs that were also suitable for disco. Interpol jumped on the bandwagon, but then quickly fell again. Their lead singer Carlos Dengler left, and the band settled into a decade of successful but critically acclaimed albums. The latest, 2022’s The Other Side of Make Believe, only reached No 178 in the US charts.
So it’s no surprise that their upcoming eighth album, The Mirror Weighs a Ton, is their masterpiece. “We all just showed up,” guitarist Paul Banks says of the band, which has grown significantly since two touring musicians, Brad Truax and keyboardist Brandon Curtis, have become full-time members. Banks continues: “The lyrics to the last song, it’s hard for me to know what I’m doing. I felt like I made some mistakes. What were they? I don’t want to draw attention to myself!”
Indie disco music is back – Wake Up even shimmies to the sound of bongos – and the whole album has emotional and tonal depth, aided by playwright Andrew Wyatt, who won an Oscar for co-writing A Star is Born’s Shallow, co-produced the zeitgeist hit Barbie and worked on Luxsal.. There’s a trip-hoppish opener, jazz-fusion synth soloing, everything from xylophones to woodwind and, in Enemy, the odd sound of a rock band making a piano ballad. As well as intimate dramas of the past, these words are at odds with our time, from the war in Ukraine to AI.
Banks makes for good company over lunch in a central London hotel, with a long, introspective history of his work including a peppery recent: “Have you ever seen Fawlty Towers?” He says under his breath after the waiter left. “Sounds good Manuel.” He is coming from Berlin, where he lives with his wife, fashion designer Juliet Seger and two small children. His hair is fringed but he still wears a smart shirt collar under his father’s pullover. “For me, having children is the greatest satisfaction,” she said. And if I’m going to have a job that keeps me from being away from my family sometimes, then I don’t want any job that’s boring.
But he said: “I want to feel that I am enough, I don’t think there is anything that can solve that.”
Menterpol was always a big hit with their peers in 00s NYC that spawned the Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and LCD Soundsystem. Back then, “through depression and loneliness, I found a way to release my sadness a little, by being creative”, Banks says. “It takes struggle and suffering for an artist to want to create.
Daniel Kessler, who I spoke to that day on the phone from New York, felt the same way. “When I’m writing things” – Interpol’s music always begins life and the continuation of Kessler’s music – “it’s like: if I don’t do this, I’ll be miserable, and something might be suppressed in me. Being in a group, writing songs together, definitely produces angst, frustration, frustration. I’m awake.”
Kessler says Interpol stood apart from other groups of the 00s: “This collaboration, the CBGB style of everyone is in one place, which didn’t happen for us.” But even though Kessler considered himself to be “very shy when he hangs out, the same shyness I had when I was a kid,” he and the band weren’t laughing in the corner. We were quite loose. Without a doubt, Carlos was great with this: What’s next after the gig? It was fun in a way I don’t think it would be now.” Why give up? “Social media,” he says, means you can’t party in private anymore. “And even the way people choose restaurants now: they check what they want to order before they go. I love New York in that time (of the early 00s): incredible nights happened because you just go by the moment.” For Banks, New York was, and is, “a line of wisdom, a place of human energy chakra – it increases you”.
The group of emotional young men had their own thoughts: Dengler, who left, explained that he had PTSD. Are there times when you are very conflicted? Banks lowers his voice in a low, haunting register. Many years before Carlos left, and then on and on since then.
But fatherhood has made him “a little more romantic and less reserved”, and his unexpected collaboration with Wu-Tang Clan leader RZA – he released an album as Bankz & Steel in 2016 – has also helped. “RZA doesn’t just fight stuff. If you don’t like it, fine, fine, let’s do something else. Here’s a guy who doesn’t do anything, but his talent is growing.” Banks quotes Clive Owen’s film Croupier: “‘Hold on tight, let go.’ There is great wisdom there.”
Interpol have gone on an anniversary tour and are playing UK arenas this autumn with fellow 00s NME favorites Bloc Party. I wonder if Kessler is worried he’s going to get hyped, but no: “It’s really cool that people care about what you did decades ago. I’m happy to play anything.” As a child, he “hated it when bands played old songs reluctantly – I felt like they were putting something I really loved”.
And while he admits that he is “looking for new chapters” in his life at the age of 51, “I am like a sailor who sees the world.” Interpol seems to have faced the problem of their last album: they only played arenas in Australia and New Zealand with Deftones, and in 2024 they gathered a crowd of 160,000 people when they played a free concert in the main square of Mexico City. They recently gained gen Z fans by supporting pop star Sombr on tour. Kessler is also excited about the prospects of drummer Sam Fogarino, who sang on the new album but is out of the guest lineup as he recovers from back surgery: “He’s in a good place.”
Suntil, This Glass Weighs a Ton is often as heavy as its title implies. Iron City’s music, Banks says, “is a dialogue between the narrator and the artificial intelligence of the future that protects the human family that still lives – or not”. He jokes about concerns about whether to write about AI: “Don’t talk bad about it, or it will drive your car off the road in 15 years. But if there are consequences to being open and honest about the situation, then bring it up.
“The AI is always waiting for us to throw the stick so it can go on a chase,” he continues. It can only erase everything that has existed so far, and that photocopy will eventually become very boring and will no longer affect a person’s life.
Black is still a Wounded Soldier, inspired by images of the Russian-Ukrainian war. How terrible, I say, that you can enter the social media and suddenly see the last moments of a soldier, “just shaking his head instead of letting the drone blow him up”, Banks interrupts. His voice trembled a little. Maybe it’s the old way of being a parent, to feel that every life is precious, but it’s so sad, what we do.”
On all the real topics, Banks’ voice remains poetic and abstract. Language, and how it carries meaning, seems to be his main interest. “The power of words is limitless. And there are many people who have no objection to what they say and what they do to the world.” Especially the Trump administration. “How can Marco Rubio or JD Vance say what they’re saying, when they’re smart? It’s too dark, sir. How do they look in the mirror?” Or Elon Musk: “After Nancy Pelosi’s husband gets hit in the head with a hammer (in 2022), Musk also wrote a little bit of fake news indicating that it came from a guy at a gay bar. It’s scary and crazy – and I love him.
“Interpol didn’t like to write political songs (at that time few people did) “I don’t like politics, I like the human spirit,” says Banks. The irrationality of today’s politics has changed that. “We live in a world where all these conflicts are caused by how you can shape the hearts and minds of people who can suspect that they benefit from evil. they may not realize that someone can be so evil. They are good people, and it would never enter their consciousness that a man could be so corrupt that he would destroy history. That someone would lie so much about the election. Because he is the president.”
So he writes to honor the richness and power of language, in a world that has been deliberately destroyed. “There’s a quote by Kafka, that good writing should be like a hammer to the cold pool of ideas,” he says. For Banks, the challenge is to take the “cosmic energy” of life, “and put it into the world in small meaningful words, from the words that we have, with 26 letters. You have to refresh and revive the way these words work to have any chance of expressing the depth of what it is to be human. I’m almost trying to make sure that we don’t remember, or we don’t forget the language we remember. They are very powerful, and they can be false.”
These are big goals, and I feel that Banks is on a big mission of trying to understand himself. He repeats that his children “give me a real sense of fulfillment. But as an artist I have really held on to this childhood idea of: I want everything. For many artists, there is a real need to be seen and heard. I try not to show it, but I agree with this idea that sometimes even a bad interest is care: Trump gets away from it.” Needy people like this, he says, sometimes “make something bad happen so that there are conflicts and then they feel watched. I still struggle (with it) and I have this in me, a childish need for something.
Whatever the need and wherever it’s coming from, Banks says he tries to fill it with his creativity. With a sad smile he gives an example of being in high school, looking at a girl in a cafe. “I’ve never had a game; even my wife moved with me. So I didn’t say anything to this girl and it just hurt.” In many cases, the desire for another woman is very painful. I felt that if I went home and picked up a guitar and made something beautiful, that would make me fit in the universe. useful if I make something beautiful Wanting to take the mess and put something beautiful on it, I still love it.
