The Timeless Cool Of Interpol: Stalwarts Reach New Generation & Fill The Zócalo

Eerie and evocative, dreamy but foreboding, Interpol’s “Take You On A Cruise” from the band’s seminal 2004 album Antics details a sea-spray-flecked seduction. The band’s lead singer Paul Banks — with his distinctive velvet hammer baritone — opens the song with a lyric of enviably subtle wordplay: “Timeless like a broken watch.”

The song itself isn’t autobiographical nor is it the kind of aspirational song bands write about their future celebrity. It’s a song about, well, a guy who wants to take a woman on a cruise.

Still that lyric works as a five-word distillation of what Interpol has become and what perhaps they foresaw for themselves even then.

Antics, which celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2024, was the band’s second album on Matador Records, following 2002’s Turn On The Bright Lights, the record that propelled them beyond the heady, sweaty, busy New York indie scene of the earliest years of the millennium, which catapulted a certain variety of indie into the mainstream. There was no unifying concept — the Strokes fuzzy neo-garage and LCD Soundsystem’s rocktronica, for example, share little thematically with Interpol’s sometimes gothy post-punk, a literary and youthful and oh-so-New York recast of New Order and Bauhaus. But there was an energy they all shared. 

Many of the bands of those days have broken up, reformed, become only-sometimes touring acts, leaning heavily on the nostalgia now-40-somethings have for their sleek and sexy 20s. But Interpol? They’re still out, still making new music while honoring those days, still finding new fans, still a going concern.

That comes as no surprise to the band’s U.S. agent, High Road Touring’s Matt Hickey (13 Artists’ Charlie Myatt reps the band elsewhere). He was right in the thick of it in the early days, booking shows in New York. And there was a band he grew to know and love that he just felt that something about.

“They were always playing for A&R people. They would ask me if they could get in early at Mercury Lounge because some A&R guy had to go to an early dinner or whatever and I was always impressed with how together the band was. No matter the time they played, they had 80 or 100 people there. They were professional and cool and together and able to hit the mark from the very beginning. They had a real identity already as to what they were doing,” he says.

Two decades later, the band still has that identity — sonically and aesthetically, Interpol is distinctive; the bold and simple colors of their stage design complement their classic cool style, all of which ties with the noir-rock sound — and it has helped the band navigate the rapids of changing fashion, something many of their contemporaries struggled to do. What that means is that an Interpol crowd isn’t merely 43-year-olds fighting the structural integrity of denim to fit back into skinny black jeans. It’s people in their 20s born just a few years before the band’s debut. It’s teenagers who refer to the ‘90s as “the 1900s.”

Even the band’s team reflects this cross-generational appeal. Interpol is managed out of Red Light’s London office by James Sandom, who is very much of the demographic that was there in the heady indie-loving fin de siècle, and by Al Mills, who was born six years before Antics hit record store shelves. The pair have perichoretic perspectives on Interpol’s persistence that are nevertheless views from different windows.

“We have other artists we manage out of this office that have had one or two massive songs and that can be beautiful because it blows you up, but can also become an albatross around your neck,” Sandom says. “Interpol, to be frank, has never had a hit. The hit is the band. The aesthetic is the hit. The spirit, the atmosphere, the real hit of Interpol is the whole thing. it’s the personalities. … The whole spirit of Interpol as a being and this amazing rhythmic thing that is remarkably off-kilter but very heavy and dense. The combination of those things means that they have a really defined sound even though there are elements that are hallmarks of previous generations.”

Mills says the band “definitely evokes a specific period of time and you can’t discredit that.”

“There is maybe a sense of nostalgia for an older generation and it reminds them of their youth,” she says. “But at the same time there’s a lot of people my age group but also younger, who weren’t there at the time, didn’t get to see them, but they’re still going and they’re still active and you can still see them but ultimately there’s a beautiful thing that is a feeling and an atmosphere.”

Yes, they both say, it is indeed timeless. Emo’s repeated popularity banks on the truth that there will always be teenagers going through the paroxysms and big feelings of adolescence. Interpol, Mills says, is there for the misty opacity of your 20s.

“They speak really beautifully to people growing up, when it’s weird, murky, confusing, your feelings are all over the place, you’re unsure of who you are and you’re in that discovery phase in your life,” she says. “I think it’s important to acknowledge that they’re still writing and they’re still active and they’re so future thinking as much as they are reflective.”

But if that sort of consistent success was easy, everyone would do it, and sometimes, as the band’s drummer Sam Fogarino says, you don’t really know what the secret sauce is. “Every decade has its tastemakers and wannabes—it’s nothing new. The fact that Interpol is still relatable is too subjective to consider. There’s a luck factor and a cosmic one. I thank both,” he says.

These days, as new generations find the band, they are finding new success in places where their popularity has remained robust, such as Latin America.

Seven of the band’s all-time Top 25 grosses reported to Pollstar Boxoffice are in Mexico (see chart, page 31). And that doesn’t account for the biggest show of all, in Mexico City’s main square, Zócalo, April 20. It was a free show, produced in conjunction with the Mexican government and OCESA, the country’s largest promoter and which Live Nation picked up a controlling interest in at the end of 2021.

Local officials estimated the crowd between 160,000 and 200,000, a number that the band’s lead singer, Paul Banks (who spent part of his high school years living in Mexico City, speaks fluent Spanish in the Mexican dialect and plays a guitar given to him by a chum from that era), says is beyond comprehension, which also makes it beyond the realm of fear.

“The brain doesn’t really have a particularly cautionary mechanism to cope with that sort of circumstance,” he tells Pollstar, likening it to the vertiginous experience of staring over a 40-foot ledge contrasted with being in an airplane, which feels fairly safe.

“The distance is so unimaginable that your brain’s not set up to be like ‘Oh shit.’ … If you’ve done Glastonbury, and the number of people is so vast you can’t even process it, once you’re upwards to 40 or 50,000, it’s just like, what’s one more person?”

Even if the crowd in sheer numbers was neurologically difficult to process, the energy was palpable. Banks recalls, “It was very magical and humbling and exhilarating. I experienced a real feeling of gratitude … to be in the midst of so many people with such a positive energy. … A mass gathering where everyone’s having a really great time, that’s really special.”

“It was really something else,” the band’s guitarist Daniel Kessler adds. “It was a very beautiful moment, the audience is the best in the world and just really present and passionate and joyful.”

Kessler recalls the band’s first run in Mexico in 2005. At a time when the band was drawing maybe a couple thousand people to American shows, it was selling out 5-6,000-cap rooms south of the border. Slated for two shows at Mexico City’s 7,500-cap WTC, the band’s sound engineer Harley Zinker (who has been with the group since the beginning and remains so) and then-tour manager said the second night had to be canceled, because the shaking of the floor during the first was so intense, there were safety and sound quality concerns. That show was postponed two months and moved to the Palacio De Los Deportes, selling 11,479 tickets. 

The band’s popularity among Latin American audiences — they’re in the midst of a MOVE Concerts-promoted tour of Central and South American theaters presently; they’ll head stateside for a Bonnaroo appearance thereafter — has influenced their touring in the U.S. as well. In May, the band went on a short five-city run through U.S. cities with large Latin populations — Houston, San Antonio and El Paso, Texas; Mesa, Arizona; and Las Vegas. Dubbed “Interpolores,” the tour also featured Argentine rockers Él Mató a un Policía Motorizado.

“We thought we’d put them with bands that were meaningful to a Latin audience and see what was there,” Hickey said. “We had 3,000 on a Sunday in Houston and 3,000 in San Antonio on a Monday.”

El Paso isn’t exactly a must-stop for most bands, but the show at the city’s County Coliseum was Interpol’s third in the border town since returning to the road in 2022. Hickey said credit card data indicates significant numbers of ticket buyers were coming from across the Rio Grande in Juarez.

But to be able to maintain global success for more than two decades — on the other side of the Atlantic, the band remains a strong draw in Europe, both on the festival circuit and as a headliner — a band has to remain a band. Interpol isn’t immune to the tumult of rock: enigmatic and broody bassist Carlos D (Dengler), once described as the band’s “most infamous” member left the band in 2010. Still, Banks, Kessler and Fogarino have been constants since Fogarino’s first show in May 2000. 

“We’re three people that are really committed to the art,” Banks says, calling Interpol’s members music lifers. “I don’t think one of us would have switched over and gone into, I don’t know, fucking medicine halfway through … There’s just enough gravitational pull and electricity there and there’s a special alchemy we all recognize.”

So is the secret taking breaks? Communication? Professionalism? Luck?

“All of the above,” Fogarino says. “with a healthy bit of ego and stubbornness.” 

Kessler says making music still feels fresh as it did during the early un-air-conditioned days in late ’90s New York. “We’re not short for ideas or inspiration from each other and the chemistry is just that thing that really charges us to keep going like down that road outside,” he says.

That inspiration can come from new work — all three members seem especially enamored with playing “Toni” off their newest album, 2022’s The Other Side of Make-Believe; for his part, Kessler enjoys it because he gets to play piano and “we’re not really known for songs built around the piano.”

And it can come from the back catalog, or more specifically, from new audiences discovering new favorites on old records. The Pythia of the streaming algorithm has, for whatever reason, divined out a surging interest in Interpol’s 2007 release Our Love To Admire. “No I In Threesome” and “Pioneer to the Falls” have been live staples for a while; the latter, despite being six minutes and a bit quiet and slow, went over like gangbusters in May at Pasadena’s Cruel World Festival. Banks’ pauses were punctuated by perfectly timed lighting in a way that made Kessler feel like he could “hear the silence.” A lesser-known track — “Pace Is The Trick” — has lately seen an uptick on streaming, something the Red Light team noticed and passed to the band, who opened their encore with it in Houston having not played it live since 2008. 

“They sound checked it and it was all over Reddit and people were like, ‘Oh my God, maybe this is the night they play it!’ And when they did play it was phenomenal; James and I were at home on our phones and Reddit and Twitter were just blowing up,” Mills says.

“It’s a trip. It totally reignites an older song when met with young enthusiasm,” Fogarino says.

There’s never going to be a shortage of young enthusiasm, because there will always be young people looking for music that teaches them something about themselves and there will always be the formerly young who remember those times. And there will be Interpol.

“They play Interpol music — what an amazing thing to be able to do,” High Road’s Hickey says. “That’s the benefit of all that work. They are inspiring to be around and I’m fortunate to be part of their team, because, damn this is really fucking good.”