“Elon Musk is dangerous and crazy. And I kind of liked him: Interpol talks about their political awakening – and creates their masterpiece | Interpol

SFits. Customary poetry. Moody, insistent riffs. It used to be that you knew what to expect from New York City’s rock scene. The band’s first two albums, in the early 2000s, were huge hits, moving half a million units each thanks to dramatic songs also suitable for dancing in indie disco. Interpol duly jumped to a major ranking, but soon fell back again. Talisman guitarist Carlos Dengler resigned, and the band settled into a decade of solidly successful but largely predictable albums. Their latest 2022 release, 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, will be a masterpiece. “We really all showed up,” guitarist Paul Banks says of the band, which swelled into a quintet as two touring musicians, bassist Brad Truex and keyboardist Brandon Curtis, became full-time members. “The lyrics of the last record, it’s very hard for me to recognize what I was doing,” Banks continues. “I felt like I made some mistakes.” What were they? “I don’t want to draw attention to them! I just don’t want to walk away feeling like this again.”

The indie disco songs are back – wake up to the sound of bongos – and the rest of the album has tremendous emotional and tonal depth, with the help of producer Andrew White, who won an Oscar for co-writing A Star is Born’s Shallow, co-created the zeitgeist-dominant Barbie movie soundtrack and worked on Rosalía’s Lux. There’s a trip-hop opener, jazz-fusion solos, everything from xylophones to woodwinds, and, in Enemy, the rare sound of a rock band making a great piano song. In addition to ancient, intimate human dramas, the lyrics confront the hells of our contemporary moment, from the war in Ukraine to artificial intelligence.

Banks is in great company over lunch in a central London hotel, with long, searching reflections on his work as well as some peppery side notes: “Have you ever seen Fawlty Towers?” He says sotto voce After the stuttering waiter left. “She gives Manuel.” He is visiting Berlin, where he lives with his wife, fashion designer Juliette Seeger And two young children. His hair has some curly edges but he still wears a smart shirt collar under his father’s jacket. “Having children for me is the ultimate fulfillment,” he says. “Having this being who makes you feel so safe and sleeps in your arms is so powerful and beautiful. If I’m going to have a job that takes me away from my family sometimes, I don’t want anything mediocre. I feel this responsibility to be a better version of myself.”

But he says: “Wanting to feel complete, I don’t think anything can really solve that. When I was young, I thought it would be through love. Now I think you need more than that.”

Interpol were always the bluesiest of their peers in the ’00s New York City scene that produced the Strokes, Yes Yes Yes, and LCD Soundsystem. At that time, “through longing and loneliness, I found a way to remove my sadness a little, through creativity,” 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 spoke to later that day by phone from New York, feels the same way. “When I write something” – Interpol’s songs My Life almost always begins with a Kessler chord progression – “it’s like: If I don’t do this, I’ll be miserable, and something inside of me could be repressed. To be in a band, and write music together, it definitely takes away the anxiety, the mood swings, the depression. It’s profound.”

Interpol sat apart from those other loud bands of the 2000s: “That camaraderie, that kind of CBGB scene where everyone’s in the same place, that wasn’t happening for us,” Kessler says. But although Kessler felt “extremely shy in social situations, the same kind of shyness I felt when I was a little kid,” he and the band weren’t complaining in the corner. “We were definitely punks. Definitely decadent. Carlos was very good at that stuff: What’s the next thing to do after a party? He was fun in a way I don’t think it is now.” Why not? “Social media,” he says, which means you can no longer celebrate in private. “And even the way people choose restaurants now: They check what they’re going to order before they go. I’ll romanticize New York in that.” [early-00s] Time period: Incredible nights will happen because you were just staying in the moment. For Banks, New York was, and remains, “a great hotspot of creativity, a chakra point of human power—it supercharges you.”

This group of sentimental young men inevitably had their disorders: the late Dengler described himself as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Were there moments of serious tension? Banks drops his voice into a low, hoarse register. “Yes. Yes. The years before Carlos left, and after that it was off and on. There’s who you think you want people to be – and then there’s who they are.”

But fatherhood has made him “somewhat more loving and less inclined to hold on to grievances,” and his unlikely partnership with Wu-Tang Clan leader RZA – they released an album as Bankz & Steel in 2016 – also helped. “RZA won’t fight things. If you don’t like it, well, great, let’s do something else. Here’s someone who never bends over anything, and yet his creativity thrives.” Banks quotes Clive Owen’s Cropper: “Hold tight, let go lightly.” There is great wisdom there.”

Interpol have been on anniversary tours of old albums and are playing UK arenas this autumn with fellow NME favorites Bloc Party. I wonder if Kessler is worried about it becoming a nostalgia act, but no: “It’s very flattering when people are interested in something I did two decades ago. I’m happy to play anything.” As a child, he “hated when bands played old songs live – it felt like they were hurting something I really loved”.

While he admits that he is “looking for some new chapters” in his life at 51, “I have to be a sailor who sees the world.” Interpol seems to have gotten over the failure of their last album: they have just 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 Mexico City’s largest public square. They would soon gain Gen Z fans by supporting pop star Sombre on tour. Kessler is also optimistic about the prospects of drummer Sam Fogarino, who played on the new album but is off the touring lineup while recovering from spinal surgery: “He’s in a really good place.”

SEven this mirror that weighs a ton is often as heavy as its title suggests. The song “Iron City” is “a dialogue between the narrator and a futuristic artificial intelligence that protects the human family that survives — or doesn’t survive,” Banks says. He jokes about worrying about writing about AI: “Don’t talk shit about it, or it’ll take your car off the road in 15 years. But if there are repercussions for being open and honest about how bad things are, then go for it. Screw you! I’d rather go out defiant.”

“The AI ​​is always waiting for us to throw down the stick and come out and chase us,” he continues. “It can only draw from everything that has existed so far, and that light version will eventually start to become really boring and have no impact on the human experience. So you can’t do it without us.”

Darker still, “The Wounded Soldier” is inspired by drone footage from the Russian-Ukrainian war. How terrifying, I say, to be able to go on social media and suddenly witness the final moments of a soldier, “just blowing his head off instead of letting the drone blow him up,” Banks interjects. His voice trembles a little. “You can’t desensitize yourself to these things. Maybe it’s the old cliche of being a parent, or feeling how valuable every life is, but what we’re doing is very sad.”

For all the specific themes, Banks’ lyrics remain poetic and mysterious. It seems that language, and how it carries meaning, is what fascinates him mainly. “The power of words is limitless. There are so many people who have no qualms about what they say and what it does to the world.” Specifically the Trump administration. “How can Marco Rubio or J.D. Vance say what they say, when they’re clearly smart? It’s so dark, dude. How do they look in the mirror?” Or Elon Musk: “When Nancy Pelosi’s husband was hit in the head with a hammer [in 2022]Musk reposted some small news articles suggesting they were from someone from a gay bar. This is dangerous and crazy, and I was kind of loving it.

“Interpol didn’t write political songs (few people did at the time). I don’t like politics, I like the human spirit,” Banks says. But the absurdity of today’s political scene has changed that. We live in a world where all these arguments center around how it shapes the hearts and minds of people exposed to rhetoric. I feel sorry for people who give the benefit of the doubt to evil men because they can’t understand that someone could be so evil. They’re good people, and it can’t even enter into their consciousness that a person could be so hurt that he would actually hurt history. That someone could lie so much about an election. Because he is president“.

So he writes to honor the richness and power of language, in a world where it is being deliberately corrupted. “There’s a Kafka saying, ‘Good writing should be like a sledgehammer on the frozen pond of the mind,'” he says. For Banks, the challenge is to take the “cosmic energy” of life, “and pull it out into the world in these little balls of meaning, of words that we have, made up of 26 letters. You need to revamp and revitalize how these words work to have any chance of expressing the deep essence of what it means to be human. I’m almost trying to make sure that we remember not to let language, or the ways in which we express ourselves, become stale. Because they’re so powerful, they can be a lie.”

These are serious goals, and I feel like Banks is on an equally serious mission to try to understand himself more fully. He reiterates that his children “give me a real sense of accomplishment. But as an artist, I also hold on to this childish feeling: I want it all. For a lot of artists, there’s this real need to be seen and heard. I try not to show it, but I relate to this idea that sometimes negative attention is attention: Trump runs from that.” Needy people like this, he says, “sometimes they cause something terrible to happen, there’s a confrontation and then they feel seen. And I’m still kind of wrestling.” [with that] And I keep that inside me, this insatiable, childish need for something. I don’t know what it is anymore. “I don’t think this is a confession – I have made peace with whatever degree it was, was, or will be.”

Whatever that need is and wherever it comes from, Banks says he tries to fill it with his art. With a wry smile he gave an example of being in high school, staring at a girl in a café. “I had never played a game; even my wife had taken that step with me. So I didn’t say anything to this girl and it hurt so bad. Often times, longing for a woman hurt me so bad. I felt like if I came home and picked up a guitar and made something beautiful, that would somehow make me worthy in the universe. Maybe that would make this woman notice me! And also, maybe it would fill this huge gap: I would feel valid and worthwhile if I created something beautiful. And my desire to take this mess is And putting something beautiful there, I still feel that way.