A chandelier of CCTV cameras hangs down from the cover of Interpol’s eighth album, a portrait of both the band’s DNA and of this record. Their sound has always been one of elegance, but coloured by the gloom of a very urban modernity. On ‘This Mirror Weighs A Ton’, the New York indie heroes are feeling watched by the modern world, while also reflecting on their own worth.
There are generally more eyes on Interpol in 2026. Their new record label Partisan (also home to IDLES, Geese and PJ Harvey) reports that more than half of the band’s 2.5million monthly Spotify listeners are under the age of 35. It’s a rare feat for a band of their vintage to have a following beyond 6 Music dads, but there’s a new generation taking up front rows of gigs, devouring their pristine tailored aesthetic, discovering the scene-defining ‘Turn On The Bright Lights’ and ‘Antics’ as the modern-day classics they are, and turning sleeper hits like ‘Rest My Chemistry’ into actual hits.
After 2022’s esoteric and textured ‘The Other Side Of Make-Believe’ was written with the band apart during lockdown, they yearned to make something more live and physical, to be “loud in a room together”, as frontman Paul Banks told NME. Adding to this overall compulsion, ‘This Mirror…’ marks their first album to be recorded in their native NYC in over a decade. Assisted by producer Andrew Wyatt (formerly of Miike Snow and now behind huge records by Liam Gallagher, Rosalía and Charli XCX) and with longtime touring member Brad Truax stepping in to write basslines with the kind of purpose missing from the lower end of their sound since the departure of the vampiric Carlos D in 2011, you can see they laid the table for their vow of: “Let’s make this one count”.
The title track is to be filed alongside ‘Untitled’, ‘Next Exit’ and ‘Pioneer To The Falls’ in their lineage of excellent cinematic openers. Banks, with some heavenly backing vocals from his wife Juliet Seger, sings of the heavy burden of having a word with yourself above a hypnotic Massive Attack-esque nocturnal groove to create a huge sense of space. Then fellow lead single ‘See Out Loud’ fills it with that classic Interpol post-punk propulsion as the singer gets lost looking for escape in the abandon of a very, very late night (“I start to feel pixelated as we get buried in the sound”). Adding to the tension is a criminally rare vocal from guitarist Daniel Kessler to beg the question: “I’m not impatient, but when do we play?”
The album is front-loaded for impact, as the skittering sonic landscape of ‘Iron City’ sees “thoughts invaded, memories degraded” by AI overlords, before “dreams of violence” from constant war coverage take over in the slow-burning but locked-in ‘Wounded Solder’, and surefire future single ‘Wings On Fire’ proves an anxiety-driven, arena-shaking banger to “find out who you are” in a timeline of chaos. The wide-open orchestral sky of ‘Ever The Actor’ clears the horizon for shit to get really weird on the flipside.
Interpol, 2026. Credit: Eliot Lee Hazel
‘So Rides The Reindeer’’s mesh of Missy Elliot beats, handclaps and bittersweet acoustic guitar make for something more akin to Gorillaz but a welcome first of an Interpol record as Banks matches the fever dream (“Up is down, tonight we drown”) ahead of drummer Sam Fogarino showing off his undersung flair on the Truax bass earworm of ‘Darling Thoughts’ and the Talking Heads carnival rhythms and the scratchy funk on ‘Wake Up’, taking things to a more hedonistic high. Interpol having fun? You heard it here first folks, but it doesn’t last long as Kessler lays down some tender piano for the spacey devotional hymn ‘Enemy’, with shadows of Nick Cave and ‘Amnesiac’-era Radiohead.
Banks described ‘This Mirror Weighs A Ton’ to NME as a “no-skips” album. It definitely bears riding it through for the whole journey of Interpol’s sonic past, present and future laid out, marking their most unified yet experimental effort in years and arguably their most consistent and satisfying since ‘Antics’. The drive of the record, we are told is “a spirit of striving for elation, enlightenment and clarity”. Mission accomplished. As we close on the sparse beauty of ‘Sudden’ the frontman concludes: “I was born uncertain, that’s what keeps me intact”. A fitting end for Interpol’s most human and personal record to date, one that accepts constant change.
Details
Release Date: August 28, 2026
Label: Partisan
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