INTERPOL - This Mirror Weights A Ton

The new work by Interpol carries a sophisticated, subtle and ambiguous charm that, true to its title, unfolds as a play of reflections between what has been and what is.

I was here before
you can’t see me anymore
I have lived a life
and I left you there inside

From the verses of “Iron City” emerges one of the finest lines ever dedicated to the relationship with New York, words that reveal just how much the return to their home city has reoxygenated the band's inspiration. The unprecedented expanded line-up, with longtime live bassist Brad Truax (among the album's co-writers) and keyboardist Brandon Curtis, together with the production of Andrew Wyatt, has visibly reinvigorated the band's enthusiasm and pushed the songs beyond yet another nocturnal rehash of well-worn templates, toward a new, dawn-like freshness. The compositional richness that submerges Paul Banks's aching voice is like a chromed fog; a haziness that intensifies the light wherever memory and the present merge into an unprecedented reverb. The string and synth interventions help expand the overall atmosphere, lightening and rarefying it, dressing the band's familiar unease and emotional claustrophobia in the blinding glow of an artificial vision.

A style immediately evident in the opener “This Mirror Weights A Ton”, a surreal mirage of countless versions of the self, a three-sided mirror held up by Fogarino's dark, distant beat; an atmospheric void in which Kessler's airy guitar and Juliet Seger-Banks's backing vocals drift, adrift. “Fade in Symphonic/ Like the phone that's dialing/ Alone Again/ Unknown again”. An overall slowing down that finds, in its sense of anticipation and pronounced production baroquism, a convincing and moving evocative power.
The electronic transfigurations of “So Rides The Reindeer”, whose synth notes could have come straight off an Air record, or the liquid, rippling piano of “Enemy” and “Sudden”, are remote, at times disorienting settings, capable of heightening the songs' nostalgic and melancholy charge without ever weighing them down. Worth noting again is “Iron City”, a long dialogue with a majestic, generative figure, steeped in urban, solitary and dystopian vistas. A device that also enriches the album's more post-punk episodes, such as “See Out Loud”, the single “Wings On Fire”, or the loose-limbed “Wake Up” and “Bird And The Serpent”, in which Banks's voice once again winds with class through Kessler's sharper, more incendiary chords, drawing on a notable variety of outcomes and solutions that obey the physics of overtaking: pulling back to gain more momentum.

We slept too deep and the dreams repeat, but it’s fading now

Returning to where it all began, Interpol have finally come to terms with themselves, reached an awareness of just how inevitable change is, yet proven they haven't lost the dark, decadent heart that has always accompanied them.
NYC, we are impressed.

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30/08/2026