Interpol's songs: Listen to songs by Interpol on Myspace, Stream Free Online Music by Interpol. Find Interpol discography, albums and singles on AllMusic. Turn on the Bright Lights Matador Antics. Antics Matador Our Love to Admire.
Album: Marauder Artist: Interpol Label: Matador Genre: Alternative Music crit pep talk: I won’t slobber over Antics, I won’t slobber over Antics. Interpol, though, right? Phenomenal stuff. A definitive band of the early 2000s, when indie felt vital and exciting.
Their first two albums, Turn on the Bright Lights and Antics – oh, precious Antics – are blog-era guitar music classics. These New York pulpiteers pulled from the darkest corners of throwback post-punk to make dapper guitar music shrouded in sin. If the Grim Reaper does exist, maybe he comes to collect souls in a slim-fit suit and skinny tie. Interpol are among a group of great bands that arrived around the dawn of the new millennium fully formed but have found it difficult to maintain their high levels. Third album Our Love to Admire was solid but lacked the powerful vehemence of their debut (truly an era-defining record) or the hook-heavy exhilaration of Antics. The band’s self-titled fourth LP was a joyless tab of bad Quantrex.
Released in 2014, most recent effort El Pintor represented a solid, back-to-basics approach, but it couldn’t consistently find the old magic. Creatively decayed There are no hard plotlines or easy answers as to why Interpol have creatively decayed. Life gets in the way; people creep towards different places as they age. Bass guitarist Carlos Dengler left in 2010, stripping the machine of one of its components. Interpol are still an excellent live act. Their set at Electric Picnic last year, which saw them play Turn on The Bright Lights from start to finish, was a festival highlight.
Yet the prospect of the band ever cutting another classic seems as slippery as an eel on ice. If new album Marauder is better than I expected it’s because my expectations are so low. A clutch of the songs are great; some are not. Those trademark one-string guitar lines still echo; Paul Banks’s voice still lurches with extreme dread. For this album, Interpol recruited producer Dave Fridmann, perhaps hoping a new voice would freshen things up. This result is a set that has moments of real gusto – not something you can always say about a band in their 21st year together. The album is bookended by two of its best moments.
Opener If You Really Love Nothing is a drivetime rocker that asserts Sam Fogarino as still one of the most propulsive drummers in the game. Yaaron dosti lyrics. Banks’s lyrics, eternally oblique, cover a decaying relationship with a sharpness not always present in his writing (“If you really love nothing/ Do we wait in silent glory,” he cries). Final track It Probably Matters picks up the theme again. Here, Banks tunes his voice to a desperate tremble.