TURNING IT BACK ON

Interpol was once accused of ripping off historic postpunk icons. Now they are post-punk icons

Interpol releases a new album

interpol’s debut album, Turn On the Bright Lights, is one of those mysteriously great records that landed in precisely the right place at the right time: early-2000s New York City.

Turgid nü-metal was on the decline and rock was on the rise. Interpol had been gigging, releasing EPS and amassing hype since 1997. CBGB was still a club and not yet a branding exercise appropriated by Target. The city was affordable for bands: Hypergentrification had not yet rendered Manhattan a playground for bankers and real estate vultures.

And then the towers fell. Recorded just two months after the World Trade Center attacks—and released in 2002—Bright Lights had a moody urgency that caught the ear of critics eager for a new authenticity. “I felt a magic when we were writing the record,” frontman Paul Banks says. “Whatever that thing is, I think we had it.”

The magic resided somewhere between Banks’s melancholy baritone and the band’s knack for swooning post-punk hooks, and it helped make Interpol into dapper icons of the city’s post-9/11 rock rebirth. Bright Lights became a critical touchstone, and Interpol an influence on bands like the Killers and the xx.

A decade and a half

later, Interpol has been reduced to a trio (bassist Carlos D departed in 2010 to become an actor), yet it remains one of the few surviving standard-bearers of a scene that included the Strokes, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the Walkmen. And on August 24 comes the group’s first album in four years, Marauder—a very good record that’s also reassuring to any fans who feared Interpol had slipped into a nostalgia coma.

There was a dive into the retrospective deep end with a 2017 tour honoring the 15th anniversary of Turn On the Bright Lights—a fanfriendly indulgence—but the band vowed to work on new material as soon as it wrapped. “We were writing this record when we did that tour,” Banks says. “It felt like we had one leg in two worlds: revisiting our first album, which still feels exciting to me, balanced by [a] leg in the future.”

For a 21st-century legacy act, the tour audiences were heartening. “I saw teenagers who were probably not even born, or barely born, when [Bright Lights] came out,” says guitarist Daniel Kessler. “I saw people who were there in 2002. And I’ve heard those stories: ‘My girlfriend and I started dating around the time you released that record, and now we have kids who are 10 years old.’”

a few years ago, interpol got stuck. Literally stuck. In November 2014, the band’s tour bus became trapped on I-90 somewhere outside of Buffalo, New York, during a formidable snowstorm. For more than 50 hours, the three musicians (plus tour mates) subsisted on dry goods and vodka. “It was serious,” says Kessler. “People