Interpol: "We didn't hit any walls this time"

Depending on just how sunny your disposition is - and let’s assume, for a second, that you’re the kind of person with a glass that’s perennially half-empty - it’s perfectly possible to view Interpol’s back catalogue, up to and including 2010’s Interpol, as an exercise in the law of diminishing returns. You could even argue that it begins right from the very get-go; “Untitled”, the first track on their now-classic debut Turn On the Bright Lights, is an album opener of such poise and intelligence that it remains unmatched by any of the band’s contemporaries - perhaps not even by any of their forebears, either. Bright Lights is unquestionably their finest hour, playing like one, long, claustrophobic mood piece; Antics, in following it, was perhaps more thrilling in the belligerence of its guitars and the pace at which it zipped along, but it lacked whatever it was that made Bright Lights so evocative.

Our Love to Admire, meanwhile, provided sweeping theatrics - “The Heinrich Maneuver”, “Pioneer to the Falls” - along with the first indications, elsewhere, that Daniel Kessler’s impossibly rich vein of songwriting form was beginning to run dry. When the New Yorkers followed it up with a self-titled LP, three years later, an attempt at experimental, more freeform compositions went awry, with some critics mistakenly attributing the meandering, uninspired sound of the album to the apparently acrimonious departure of Carlos Dengler, a man for whom a keen sense of drama seemed to permeate everything from his bass lines to his eyeliner; in actual fact, Dengler didn’t leave until the album was already in the can.

If it’s true that the band’s releases were becoming progressively weaker, though - however gradually - there’s no question that the trend has been arrested by their fifth effort, El Pintor. It is, without doubt, their best album since Antics, and there is a genuinely strong possibility that I could find myself amending that to Bright Lights in the weeks and months to come. “It’s not so much that there was disagreement last time,” says frontman Paul Banks when I ask him about the process of making Interpol. “It was more that Daniel was coming up with some fairly leftfield ideas for the album, and Carlos’ reaction was to want to move them another two degrees to the left. And, for me, neither of those guys are the kind of artist you can go to and say, “can you not do that?” They do what they do, and you leave them to it. It was simpler, this time, just because it’s easier to settle arguments when there’s three votes rather than four - there’s no possibility of stalemate. We had a very good dynamic going; I think we were just buoyed by the realisation that we could still write songs as a three-piece. We were really riding high on that positivity.”

Banks’ relaxed attitude to the band’s way of working runs contrary the intensity of his stage presence, and the foreboding drawl of his vocal approach; he seems to have been cast as a man of contradictions right from the outset. The relative scarcity of his press activity in the band’s early days lent him an enigmatic quality that’s hardly reflective of the reality, which is of a keen surfer who greets me down the phone in the style of Larry David and occasionally segues, without warning, into a comedy British accent. The last time I interviewed Banks, at a Manchester hotel on an interminably gloomy January afternoon eighteen months ago, he spoke positively of the band’s future, and seemed adamant that they wouldn’t need to bring touring bass player Brad Truax, or indeed anybody else in that capacity, into the studio with them. What he probably didn’t know, though, was that he’d end up writing and recording the basslines for El Pintor himself.

“In the past, Carlos was such an extremely quick writer,” relates Banks, “and often, the bassline would be there before Daniel had even finished his chord progressions. Because of that, I’ve historically always worked off of Carlos’ bass when I was coming up with my own vocal treatments and guitar parts, so it was probably no wonder that, with him gone, I was struggling to come up with anything when I first turned up to the studio with my guitar. Daniel suggested I bring a bass instead, and the next day, we pretty much wrote ‘My Desire’ and ‘Anywhere’ there and then. It was just this pragmatic decision; we had three days booked, I can’t think of shit on my guitar because the music is so nebulous without the bass there, so I should just bring one in and do it myself. We carried on in that vein from there on out, because it was working so well.”

When I spoke with Banks last time, he was out on the road in support of his second solo album - the first under his own name. Drummer Sam Fogarino, meanwhile, was busy working on his own solo project, EmptyMansions. That gave Kessler the opportunity to begin work on El Pintor in the same way he always has with Interpol records; on his own, in New York, comfortable in the knowledge that his bandmates would help him knock his initial ideas into shape once they were back in the same room together. “I wish I had the burden of being overly prolific,” Kessler complains, when I catch up with him on the opening night of the band’s U.S. tour. “That’s definitely not my process, though. As always, for this one, I sat down and wrote maybe fifteen songs, tops - or the origins of them, at least - and I was pretty open to going down whichever road they took me. I spent most of 2012 doing that, and once I really got into them, it was a pleasant surprise to find that they had such a different feel to what we did on the last record.”

Kessler’s approach to his work has followed this same methodology for as long as Interpol have been a going concern; as Banks put it, “it’s par for the course by now.” That’s not to say, though, that Kessler has fallen into any kind of rut or routine during that time; he remains open-minded as a songwriter. “You know, if I was going to sit myself down and say, “alright, this has got to be different from Interpol - this has got to be a song-oriented record, which is how it’s turned out - I’d probably fail to come up with anything. I can’t work that way. I need to be able to remove as much pressure from the situation as possible.”

The promise of his bandmates returning from their individual side projects creatively rejuvenated, though, proved too tempting a draw for Kessler to resist; he concedes that he made some adjustments to the writing process accordingly. “When I was coming up with the early ideas for these songs, it got a little bit frustrating, because I was thinking, “oh man, I really want to work on these tracks with my bandmates, and see what they can bring to the table.” Right from the early rehearsals after those guys came back, we attacked the songs with such vigour; everything seemed to be going by at its own speed. That just makes everything so much simpler, because you don’t have to try to make things more complicated - you don’t have to interfere. We just didn’t hit any walls this time, and we were finding all these great, unforced ways of taking the songs forwards. I remember leaving those early rehearsals and just being a little bit high from them, because the energy was so good.”

For his own part, Banks agrees. “Daniel was definitely writing more direct songs for this record than on the last one, where everything was kind of spacey. Whether it was subconscious or not, I don’t know, but there was a real sense of these songs seeming more aggressive, and trying to rock harder than we’d done in a while. There’s obviously that immediacy to ‘All the Rage Back Home’ and ‘Ancient Ways’, but then ‘Same Town New Story’ is probably as experimental a song as we’ve ever written. The pace is kind of relentless, but it’s certainly not a one-track rock record.”

The point Banks makes there relates directly to one of the most striking features of El Pintor; for the first nine tracks, it positively flies by, with only closer “Twice As Hard” representing any real kind of slow down in the sheer tempo of the album. “I didn’t actually pick up on that energy until after we’d finished mixing,” Kessler recalls. “I was trying to figure out how to sequence the thing, and I realised how fucking urgent the record sounds. I knew, then, it’d be a good idea to put ‘All the Rage Back Home’ in there early on because it could carry on that kind of Interpol tradition of having a really strong identity to the intro to the record, and then it made sense, given that ‘Twice As Hard’ is kind of the only comedown on the album, to finish it on that note. Doing that really kind of brought home how much we’d managed to achieve in a relatively short amount of time, but we weren’t actively trying to balance out the last album by making this one sound dynamic, or anything like that.”

Banks’ own achievements, meanwhile, are increasingly beginning to stretch past any period of time that you could reasonably consider short, as he stresses when I point out the relatively long gap between Interpol and El Pintor. “People talk about us taking a four-year break, but I personally haven’t taken time off since Our Love to Admire. I’ve been making records in succession for six years now, and the analogy I’ve come to think of is like a marathon runner, where your body has been going a long time but once you’re in a groove, once you’re in the zone, you feel as if you can just keep going. I feel like I hit my stride with the last solo record, and coming right off the heels of that allowed me to just slip into the process of writing with Interpol. I think I’ve progressed as an artist in that time, but it’s difficult for me to notice it happening; it’s like how, if you see a kid every day, you don’t notice them growing, but if you go a few months without seeing them, it’s “holy shit, you’ve grown!” So, you know, I hope people who didn’t hear Banks will listen to El Pintor and see some genuine progression on my part. Like the marathon runner, there’s going to come a point at which my legs give out and I need to recharge myself creatively, but as things stand, I’ve made six records in a row and I’m not ready to stop yet.”

The differences between the processes for Banks and El Pintor are clear, though; on the former, Banks wrote and recorded pretty much everything himself, often working in ways that are pretty alien to Interpol; writing on the road, recording onto laptops. The band dynamic dictates that it’s Kessler with the most creative sway, but Banks insists that the transition from solo work to band recording is always a smooth one. “It’s just very familiar for me to work with Interpol, now. It’s kind of refreshing to go from the pressure of having to write everything, to just turn up and hear these great compositions that are already done. Plus, you know, Sam’s involved, and he’s one of my favourite drummers; it’s nice to have all these jobs that I don’t have to do, and yet still have all of this new inspiration to feed off of, artistically. Working solo is kind of humbling, because you come back to Interpol and remember how much you love working with these dudes; it’s just comforting, like getting into a warm tub.”

With a characteristically heavy touring schedule likely to form the bulk of the band’s diary for the next year or so, Banks stirred up some mild controversy recently when he told The Quietus that he’d “love not to fucking tour, man,” on account of the fact that he could get more done in the studio if he wasn’t on the road for so long. “First of all, I also said that - if I had the choice - I’d still tour, just perhaps not as much,” he explains when I raise the point. “I’m aware of getting older, and I’d be honoured to still be on tour when I was fifty, because there’s a point where, when you’re living out of a suitcase and on a bus, you wonder if it’s such a grown-up thing to be doing. Don’t get me wrong, playing shows is a blast, and when you’re in you’re twenties, you can go real hard - two hundred nights a year style - and it’s no big deal, but there’s other things I’d like to try, too, and I could if I wasn’t on the road for so many months of the year.”

Kessler is altogether more diplomatic when I pose the same question to him. “I know where Paul’s coming from, and I wouldn’t want to swing towards one extreme more than the other. For me, personally, what I like about being on the road is that it gives me a break from the creative side of things. Those first few months on tour, I can just enjoy these songs we’ve made together, and not have to worry about where the next lot is coming from. I wouldn’t get that peace of mind if I stayed home after each record came out. You don’t want to have too long a break from thinking creatively, but that balance is healthy. I know I need it.”

Banks, meanwhile, already has firm designs on what he’d like to do in the future, outside of the band; Banks hinted at a cinematic side to his writing that he’s keen to indulge again in the future. “I just have the aspiration of repositioning myself, gradually. I can’t just suddenly say “I want to start scoring films”; I mean, I do, but you have to get there over time. I’ve probably spent the last six years trying to move into that space. I’d like to produce other people’s records, too, but I haven’t done shit to get myself there; I just figure the more notoriety you have as a musician, the more likely it is that somebody’s going to be willing to let you do that. I think people pick up on me talking this way and think it’s going to be the end for Interpol, or something, but the band’s always the main thing; it’s just cool to be building a resume at the same time, too. And anyway, I don’t think there’s too much wrong with wondering how much longer I want to be living on a bus with these smelly bums, you know?”

El Pintor is available via Matador on September 8th. Interpol play three sold-out UK shows next February.