The guitar line has these two different moods. I wanted the chords to be a little more gelled, so people could really bounce along to it. I think Paul got into that with the vocals as well. There’s an eeriness to the verse section that I found quite unsettling in a good way, but also emotional. “I think I wrote the guitar lines for Fables right when lockdown happened. It had a good juxtaposition between the verse and the chorus.”Īnother highlight of the record, Fables, came from the cusp of the chaos. I was kind of excited when I came up with that one, it felt a little bit different but interesting. It’s like a story within itself that came out quite intuitively. “Once we get to the first part of the chorus, it takes eight chords before it finally gets to the second sequence of it. “ felt like a different kind of song than we’d done before,” Kessler says. Image: Atiba Jefferson Still in shapeĪmong the strongest of Interpol’s new songs are pained opener and lead single Toni, Renegade Hearts with its duelling riffs, and the propulsive Passenger, one of the earliest tracks to find form. It felt quite exciting – it served as a confirmation as to why we were a band, because our chemistry didn’t depend on us being in the same room.” “I’d wake up and hear something that Paul had added to the track, then I’d stick on my headphones and go for a walk and listen to it. Interpol eventually got into the groove of long-distance writing. Each time the tracks got improved, we felt more connected to them.” It never felt like the songs were losing out because we weren’t in the room.

It didn’t feel too much of a sacrifice being separated. It began feeling very similar to rehearsal, where you make progress with one song via small changes. We’d share projects between us and add our parts, then we’d discuss it and what we’d done, and maybe go round again. But was the only game in town if you wanted to make music. “I kind of hoped it would work out but I wasn’t sure. “It wasn’t my ideal way of doing things,” Kessler says. Though jarring for a band used to hammering out fresh cuts in practice rooms, before long the web-based working methods began to click. We had to be a little more innovative, and send around song ideas via the internet.” “We’d wanted to do a new record and I knew we had a good batch of songs, but the three of us were then in three different countries with no possibility of being in the same one anytime soon.

“We had to sort of figure out how we were going to make this,” Kessler says. Though many of the new songs’ roots were discovered pre-pandemic, lockdown scuppered plans to construct the material together. I knew there was a different vibe when writing the first clutch of songs for this record, compared to writing for Marauder.” Sometimes, even in the early stages, I know if the vibe is right. It’s sort of subconscious a lot of the time. I normally have my first pot of coffee, watch a film and just come up with new ideas. “It’s just a shitty classical guitar,” he says, “but it just speaks to me. Kessler still writes the way he did when he was teenager – often on the very same guitar.

So with no travel plans, I just started writing songs.” It’s healthy to let all the touring experiences for the previous record inform who you are as a person, then you see what’s there after that. I like space because it gives you that separation between things. I tend to write more when one chapter is completed and another begins. “In those moments, I start writing songs. “After we finished touring Marauder in November 2019, I finally went back home,” Kessler tells us. At what point did he begin devising ideas for the band’s seventh full-length? The trio’s songs typically originate with the London-born player’s guitar sketches. Now, with The Other Side of Make-Believe, Kessler and co – vocalist and bassist Paul Banks and drummer Sam Fogarino – have tilted towards an even shadowier domain. READ MORE: Mia Garcia on her love of Aretha Franklin and designing a signature model in tune with the mind and body.Their broad body of work includes 2007’s ostentatious Our Love to Admire, 2014’s stripped-back El Pintor, and 2018’s Marauder which, in its finest moments, successfully bottled the thrill of visceral, impulsive music-making. The band have been expanding their musical language for 20 years, since their hallowed 2002 debut Turn on the Bright Lights established the New York post-punk troupe’s distinctive blend of emotion, eeriness and intensity. “We’re driven by reaction, and that’s been the case since day one,” says Daniel Kessler, the one-man architect of Interpol’s ever-widening guitar sound.

Songs about trust issues 2021