“Still in shape, my methods refined,” sings Paul Banks on Toni, the opening track of Interpol’s seventh studio album. Banks is a lyric writer who, throughout his career, has tended to deal in allusion and opacity, the kind of imagery that sounds as though it means something, but can essentially be interpreted in any way the listener sees fit: “Draw me a million years and I’ll probably make them my home / eternity brought me tears, but it’s the cold I collect on my own,” he sings, characteristically, elsewhere on The Other Side of Make-Believe.
But, whether intended or not, that line from Toni feels like a neat summation of where the band he’s fronted since 1997 are, 25 years later. Interpol may well have been the archetypical early 00s New York alt-rock buzz band: derivative but stylish, bedevilled by excess, unable to translate the excitement generated by their early releases into the mainstream, household-name success won by less hip but more commercially driven contemporaries.
