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Interpol: The Other Side Of Make-Believe
(Matador)
LP | CD | DL
Out 15th July 2022
Interpol return with album number seven, one which breaks from their past to shift to something that flows more naturally, opening the door to a new sense of freedom.
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Two decades have passed since the New Yorkers released their era-defining debut album, Turn On The Bright Lights. The poisoned chalice of perfectly capturing a zeitgeist has stalked them throughout much of the following twenty years as steely gazes returned every time to see if they had once again managed to bottle the lightning of that first snapshot of an industrial city facing desperation and looking for an escape. There were reasons why Joy Division surfaced so frequently as a reference in their early days, but Interpol’s music came with an added layer of sheen, an almost theatrical bombast where the cutting guitars were complemented by a full production that wrapped them with a comforting warmth. There were whispers it was a sign that something truly magical would come from them and, while Antics and Our Love To Admire, made solid attempts to live up to …Bright Lights, the desire to recapture the impact of that first shot led to slowly diminishing returns over the three albums that followed. 2018’s Marauder saw the tide starting to turn, although the record felt shorn of the dynamics that the songs needed to really lift them.
Interpol are not the first band to feel the weight of such a perfect debut album bear down on them and they will certainly not be the last, but now, on their new album, The Other Side Of Make-Believe, it feels like they are truly emerging out to, as the title suggests, the other side, to a place where there is a growing sense of liberation in their sound, albeit coupled with lyrics that focus on the alienation of our modern world.
The fact that this new album was written and demoed, as many in the last few years, with the band separated has heralded part of the change, a more hushed dynamic that spreads across much of the album. The band are no longer soundtracking the city night, but rather the sunrise that cracks through an early morning fog. That change, which according to singer Paul Banks is due to the fact that, separated by an ocean, he was not writing while singing over the volume of the band, but rather alone, locked down for months in Edinburgh, is there right from the beginning on opening song Toni. It rises slowly over a simple piano line, melancholic yet beautiful, Banks’ renewed sense of liberation laid bare. “The aim now is perfection always / The aim now is fuckin’ leave it all behind.” But the lyric contains in its simplicity a double meaning. As we are sucked further into a dystopic metaverse, where anonymity enables depersonification, we continuously redact and edit ourselves to achieve what we think others will perceive as perfection, abjuring our true selves and the world in which we live. There is no room for imperfection.
The approach to writing has also allowed the band to develop a side of their sound that is altogether more ghostly, such as on the unsettling Something Changed. The sparsity and openness leave space for dynamics to drop back and surge forth when Sam Fogarino’s drums mark such a shift. The song draws a line to Banks’ work with Muzz in the layered instrumentation. The vocal harmonies and what sounds like a clarinet run beneath like ghosts in the machine, adding to a sense of desperation of lyrics that seemingly deal with the futility of existing in a world in which we are trapped by our own disillusionment at being unable to live up to the avatars we create in our minds. “I wanna speak fast / And as we know, without substance…It becomes automatic / It becomes all but free.” It’s the paradox of a world in which freedom is sold as a construct that essentially tightens the invisible chains that bind us.
Elsewhere, such as on Passenger, guitarist Daniel Kessler crafts dizzying and cyclical riffs that spiral out, sprawling and enveloping in a way that pulls the song closer to something we have come to expect from Jonny Greenwood. His constant looping arpeggios swirl around, dropping in occasional dissonant notes that add to the sense of unease, one that continues on Greenwich, which follows. By the end of that track, we are engulfed in a paranoic cacophony of sound, dense and grating, the static white noise of life blocking out the beauty that can only be appreciated by stripping back the black mirrored distractions. The artwork for the album expresses it simply and effectively, a sharpened knife propping up a mirror in an empty space, whetted and pointed only at oneself. We are the target, the victim and our own attacker, the focus on nothing but ourself as all else around us becomes bare and insignificant.
When the band do revert back to the sound of those staccato guitars of the past, such as on Renegade Hearts, it remains full of light and shade although the overall feeling is denser. As the band snake through a menacing rhythm, guitars call out from within like birds of prey that circle above, and again that modern preoccupation that runs through the album comes out clearly. “Subliminal, we turn the page / But you can save the programmable fears.”
The band themselves have credited the involvement of Flood, alongside previous co-producer Alan Moulder, in helping them shape this evolution in their sound. Fogarino in particular has said that Flood gave them a renewed sense of honesty in their writing and it is something that enabled him to play, on songs like Renegade Hearts and the fantastic Gran Hotel, in a way that the drums, rather than playing to accentuate and counterbalance the melody, drive the songs forcefully forwards. The effect is a renewed sense of purpose in the band, one that comes through from beginning to end. They are no longer second-guessing themselves and the reactions to their work, but are rather strengthened by renewed belief in what they are doing.
The combination of Banks, Kessler and Fogarino is unmistakable, but The Other Side Of Make-Believe is Interpol at their least ‘Interpol’, seemingly finally unshackled from the spectre of their debut and free to explore something more expansive. If you’re after a return to …Bright Lights then your search is futile as the band at that time were part of a lightning rod moment, one which neither they nor their peers will ever repeat. In accepting it, they have produced their strongest album in fifteen years, one that grows and reveals itself more with each listen.
Interpol are on Facebook and Twitter.
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Words by Nathan Whittle. Find his Louder Than War archive here.
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John Robb – Editor in Chief
Sorry to be a naysaying ninny of negativity but hasn’t Interpol been making the same album for the last 15 years or so….? Love TOTBL and Antics though…
Pretty much what I said at the beginning Harold…but now they’re breaking away from it with their new one.
I think you put that perfectly, Nathan. Really enjoying this one.