Interview: Interpol Talk Their Latest Album , Trump and Their Roots

Interpol’s sixth studio album is haunted by a mysterious demagogue – a “seductive, charismatic… leader who has no trouble amassing followers”.

The Marauder cuts a chilling figure through the record. We find him sewing chaos on single ‘The Rover’ (“It’s my way or they all leave,” says the Rover) and spreading fake news on ‘Surveillance’ (“This shit is made up/ Somebody paid for it”). Is it possible he was inspired by one real-life rabble-rouser in particular? “No, I don’t think so,” says Interpol songwriter and guitarist Daniel Kessler when asked if the character is a cipher for Donald Trump. Nonetheless, he agrees that the bizarro juju of American politics may have seeped in through the cracks of the Bowery rehearsal space where the group assembled the material, and to which the NYPD paid an unscheduled visit when neighbours complained about the drums leaking through the walls. “It’s a strange time,” continues Kessler. “But it was also a strange time living in New York during 9/11.” What he’s getting at is that, to a degree, shit is always weird. It isn’t necessarily a musician’s job to speak to that. “When we write music we shut the doors and focus on each other and what we are suggesting. Not really talking – just playing and seeing what is coming.” Interpol were part of what is generally regarded as pop’s last great scene – the second coming of rock and roll to New York in the early 2000s.

They were in the vanguard of a movement that also included The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Rapture and LCD Soundsystem. For the first time since Talking Heads, Blondie and the late ’70s post-punk revolution, Manhattan was the centre of the pop universe – and bang in the middle of the whirlwind stood Interpol. Yet early success was arguably more curse than blessing. In the decade following their break-out first two albums, Turn On The Bright Lights (2002) and Antics (2004), Interpol looked in danger of becoming prisoners to their own mythology. The consensus was that they would never outshine their foundational glories and were instead doomed to repeat themselves with ever-diminishing results. A disappointing major label debut, Our Love To Admire (2007) and a bleary fourth long-player, Interpol (2010), appeared to bear out those suspicions. Theirs was, to be sure, a happier fate than that of many of their fellow travellers, who would variously burn out (The Rapture), fade away (The Strokes), or suffer incredible shrinking legacy syndrome (does anyone care about TV On The Radio in 2018?). Dogged to a fault, Interpol clung on and, after many upheavals, have escaped the shadow of their past. The glimmerings of a reinvention were detectable on El Pintor, 2014’s tune-heavy album, which was their first time in the studio since the departure of bassist Carlos Dengler. They’ve gone even better with Marauder, a furious and frantic affair that has been rightly hailed as their finest since Antics. The 43-year-old was interviewed extensively by journalist Lizzy Goodman for her recent oral history of New York rock in the 2000s, Meet Me In The Bathroom. We learned that Kessler – younger brother of Q Magazine editor Ted Kessler and, spooky fact alert, born exactly a year to the day after the author of this very article – bonded with future Interpol frontman Paul Banks while studying as exchange students in Paris. Banks was busking outside the Centre Pompidou when Kessler happened to walk by. Neither was a fully-formed musician at that point.

But they recognised an upstart determination in the other – a quality that would be instrumental in Interpol breaking through and even more so in their staying the course. In Meet Me In The Bathroom, Banks expresses the wish that he’d hung out more with The Strokes in those early days, observing that “they had better coke”. Still, even without The Strokes and the excellence of their soft-drinks, Interpol, in the first flush of their success, enjoyed the life. They partied like rock stars – which is what they were more or less. That was the picture painted by the late School Of Seven Bells singer Benjamin Curtis when Hot Press met him in 2009 (Curtis would pass away from cancer four years later at age 35). He’d toured with Interpol back in his days with Texas desert-rockers Secret Machines (Curtis’ brother and Secret Machines bandmate Brandon now plays live with Interpol). That was not a time he would forget in a hurry. “Those guys are wild,” he said. “You can only do one tour like that in your life. We were rowdy. We were like this roaming gang. I remember someone messing in a bar with Carlos. All of a sudden me and Daniel had a dude on the wall. We were like, ‘Don’t fuck with us man’.” But for Interpol the high times had to end, as Banks confided when he last passed through Dublin in 2015. As with many other overnight rock stars, they discovered that living the dream can quickly turn into a nightmare. “It got dark,” he told me. “If you look at photos of me from back then, I look bloated. It wasn’t just burgers – it was beer. I had to get my shit together. Starting out, you can sustain both. When you begin showing up really late to rehearsals, when you don’t have that spark, when you get fat… the chances of me putting out a solo record and working with Interpol were slim. Something had to go.”

Drummer Sam Fogarino had told me much the same backstage at the Oxegen festival in 2007. “You start losing clarity,” he said. “And to me that’s the scariest thing. Losing the sense of reality. Your life becomes surreal – and not in a good way. Thing becomes hazy and thick, like being stuck in the mud. At different points in time I think everyone in the band started to feel that way. The warning lights start to flash.” Kessler remembers the early success fondly – that is, when he looks back at all. He hasn’t read Goodman’s book and isn’t sure when he will get around to it. But he agrees with the thesis that something special was happening in New York. Weirdly what really stands out for him was that text messaging was becoming popular – an innovation that seemingly rocked his world more than the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Rapture or James Murphy’s DFA combined. “It was a fun time. People were going out a lot, it was great. It was also that moment just before technology where it was easy to just do stuff. A shit tonne of great bands were coming out of New York and a lot of those bands have made records I’m fond of.” Interpol self-produced their first two albums and haven’t worked with an outsider since Our Love To Admire on which they collaborated with Muse/Franz Ferdinand sideman Rich Costey.

But for Marauder they turned to Dave Fridmann, the storied behind-the-scenes figure who has worked with Tame Impala, Flaming Lips, Mogwai, Mercury Rev and countless others. “We were feeling pretty good about the material but didn’t want to be complacent,” explains Kessler. “We definitely thought about producing it ourselves but then wondered if we should go down a producer route. When Dave Fridmann became a conversation topic that sealed the deal. It felt like an exciting thing to do – we didn’t really know what the results would be.” Marauder gets a live airing from November 18-20 when Interpol play the Dublin Olympia.