S
omewhere along the way from the Mercury Lounge to the modern age, Interpol became the most reliable New York rock band of their generation. They’ve never broken up or imploded (though they’ve come close at least once), and they’ve kept to a steady cadence of one album every three or four years since their era-defining 2002 debut. All of which makes it feel like no surprise at all to press play on This Mirror Weighs a Ton, Interpol’s eighth studio album, and let the tunes pour forth, as excellently moody as ever.
Getting there, though, required some creative thinking. This Mirror Weighs a Ton features a pair of new contributors in the form of producer Andrew Wyatt and bassist Brad Truax, a longtime touring member of Interpol who had never before joined them in the studio. “It does feel like kind of a new day for the band,” says frontman Paul Banks. “It all feels invigorating, this unexpected alchemy.”
A few weeks before the album’s Aug. 28 release, Banks and guitarist Daniel Kessler are sitting down for lunch at a downtown Manhattan hotel restaurant. Neither of them lives full-time in New York anymore; Kessler spends much of his time in Barcelona, and Banks is pleasantly ensconced in Berlin with his wife and two young children. (Drummer Sam Fogarino, the band’s third member, lives in Philadelphia.) They both say they’re happy to be back in the city. “There’s something that I realized when we started touring,” Kessler says. “Whenever you came back, you could just pick up right where you left off. You come back here, and you can step right back into your life.”
They started this album not far from here, at Wyatt’s basement studio in the West Village, where they met for a few days of jamming and songwriting with Fogarino and Truax in the spring of 2024. Wyatt — an experienced pop hitmaker who fronted the Swedish-American trio Miike Snow in the late 2000s before co-writing chart-toppers for Bruno Mars (“When I Was Your Man”) and Lady Gaga (“Shallow”) — might not seem like the most obvious choice of collaborator for Interpol, but they found that he opened up new possibilities right away.
“We had a playful few days,” says Banks, who got to know Wyatt about 10 years ago when he produced some songs for Banks & Steelz, the singer’s duo project with the Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA. “It’s such an interesting dynamic to be friends with the producer. When it works, it’s a real sweet spot of having a bandmate for the moment who has all this guru wisdom about how to make great-sounding records.”
The other, arguably even bigger change to Interpol’s process on this album involved bringing in someone they’ve known for even longer. Truax has played bass in Interpol’s live lineup since 2011, when he stepped in to fill the gap left behind by the band’s volatile co-founder, Carlos Dengler, whose exit Banks compares to “losing a limb.” Banks himself, meanwhile, has held down the low end on the three studio albums Interpol has made in that timespan (2014’s masterful El Pintor, 2018’s Marauder, and 2022’s The Other Side of Make-Believe). It’s a role he took on by necessity, but one he grew to relish. “Daniel and I met up immediately after Carlos’ departure just to see, what do we have here?” Banks recalls. “And it worked. It worked really well. We rode that for a while until it came to a good, organic end.”
After a decade of working this way, Banks was intrigued by the idea of letting Truax take a crack at writing basslines to go with Kessler’s chord progressions. “It allowed me, in my writing process, to go back to the old days, where I’m either playing guitar or singing,” he says. “It felt like being back home on the microphone.”
“It was a very exciting moment,” Kessler adds. “It felt like kids in the basement, just doing stuff. it really reminded me of being 16 years old, and everything is fun.”
After five days at Wyatt’s place, they had the basics of four new tracks, ranging from the classic Interpol rager “Wings on Fire” to the unusually mellow “So Rides the Reindeer” to the rhythmically tricky “Iron City” to the somber ballad “Sudden.” For Banks, it all felt like a return to what the band does best. “Let’s get in a loud room and jam it out,” he says. “I’ll yell over the drums, and we’ll build songs with that visceral energy that comes from playing live, which is how we began.”
Not long after those sessions, feeling energized, Interpol played their biggest show ever, thrilling an estimated 160,000 fans in Mexico City. They returned to New York later in 2024 for a couple more weeks of work at Gonzo’s, a rehearsal space located in the former home of the late, lamented Mondo Kim’s on St. Mark’s Place. Back in 1997, when it was still a video and music store, that’s where Interpol’s members first met Truax, who was working there as a buyer. “I used to put up Interpol flyers there,” Kessler says. “Pretty cool, full-circle to work there.”
They recorded the bulk of This Mirror Weighs a Ton right there, in a room filled with the ghosts of turn-of-the-millennium NYC. “The fact that you can walk to and from the studio…It reminded me of the old days of Interpol, walking to rehearsals together, walking out together, ruminating on the songs that won’t leave your head,” Kessler continues. “Exciting moments that happen unexpectedly, that kind of stuff. It’s the best.”
In January 2025, after more touring, they met again in New York, this time at a new studio that Wyatt had opened on the top floor of an office space in Chinatown. “It’s a very unconventional space,” Kessler says. “It’s like a 3,500-square-foot office with no divide. There’s this openness, which is the point.”
Looking out the windows at those ever-changing “New York vistas,” Banks let his mind wander in all kinds of directions. Then he went home to Germany, where he spent the rest of 2025 writing the words to the new album. “February to October, that was my job, working on the lyrics for this record,” Banks says. “And having a baby.”
Interpol’s touring lineup, from left: keyboardist Brandon Curtis, bassist Brad Truax, guitarist Daniel Kessler, drummer Sam Fogarino, and singer Paul Banks
Elliot Lee Hazel*
Banks met his wife seven years ago, and they’ve lived together since he was stranded in Edinburgh during the pandemic. (“Full-on Gilligan’s Island scenario,” he told me in 2021.) They got married last year, and are raising a son, aged three, and a daughter, about one year old.
“I have a wonderful life in Berlin,” says Banks, whose left forearm shows the traces of two temporary tattoos applied by his three-year-old: a blue dinosaur and a fading pink elephant. “I’m a happier person.”
Like many before him, he’s found that parenthood has renewed his creative drive in surprising ways. “It made me focus on, if I’m going to be a musician, then I’m going to make it meaningful,” he says. “While, at the same time, having a little bit of a lighter touch towards the whole career side of things, because my fulfillment comes from my children’s happiness and health.” He pauses briefly. “I could get super corny.”
Please, I tell him, go on. “Becoming a father feels like new lights came on inside my soul that make me a fuller version of myself,” Banks continues. “In life, sometimes we guard a little bit how much love we put out, because it’s quite vulnerable to love. I may, in particular, have been such a person [who didn’t] all the way open up. When I had children, it’s like, ‘Oh, my God, this is all of the love that my soul is capable of creating.’ Just turn that valve all the way open, and blast it.”
Banks and Kessler have been bandmates now for more than half their lives. They met 30 years ago, in the summer of 1996, when they were both enrolled in a summer study program in Paris. “I met Paul months after he turned 18,” says Kessler, who was in his early twenties at the time. “It’s really wild that you can just meet someone. It could be just a passing moment, and all of a sudden… It’s beyond life-changing in so many ways. It’s provided so much richness.”
Neither of them takes that collaborative bond for granted. “I mean, I love this guy very much as a human,” Kessler continues. “But then you have this chemistry of making music, and you have the moments that we were talking about earlier, like in a rehearsal room basement. That’s a very special thing to have when you’re not a kid anymore. You know what I mean? To have that feeling. It’s something to treasure.”
We’re talking just a few days after the release of Reality Awaits, the much-discussed new album by the Strokes — close contemporaries of Interpol in Giuliani-era NYC, though the two groups didn’t know each other well. Banks brings them up when I ask what he’s been listening to lately, and says he’s particularly fond of “Lonely in the Future,” where an Auto-Tuned Julian Casablancas brushes off his band’s perceived enemies and imitators. Really, though, he’s more of a hip-hop head, as always. “I’ve been enjoying two of the three Drake records that he put out,” he adds. “Iceman and Maid of Honour.”
Talk turns to Interpol’s fall tour, which will take them to theaters across North America and Europe (plus one night at a Vancouver arena opening for Sombr, who was born almost a year after Antics). With a particularly strong new batch of songs to play, they’re thinking about how to adjust their set lists. “We’re not going to play, like, three-hour sets all of a sudden,” Kessler says. “That’s too much. So you have to figure out the balance. It’s an awesome problem to have.”
