With their eighth studio album, “This Mirror Weighs a Ton”, Interpol shatter their comfort zone. Guided by the hieratic pace of Paul Banks, the album turns out to be an asphyxiating and atmospheric self-analysis, a ruthless investigation into the emotional compromises and unresolved truths that sediment over time.
Interpol are a certainty. They’re not wrong. They don’t disappoint, they don’t leave things hanging.
I usually listen to the album for review three times. With “This Mirror Weighs a Ton”the eighth chapter of a dark-suit liturgy that spans almost thirty years of career, I’m already listening to it on reel and I can’t stop.
Forget the reassuring and stale label of “post-punk revival”: here we sink into an asphyxiating and atmospheric self-analysis. No easy indie-rock explosions for the use and consumption of nostalgics; the matter treated is dense, viscous, inexorable.
Born from the compositional vertigo of an increasingly hieratic Paul Banks, with melodies and words shaped simultaneously, the album dissects the neuroses of perception and emotional wear and tear.
This is also thanks to the alchemy in the engine room: with Andrew Wyatt producing and David Fridmann mixing, the rigid monochromatic palette of the New Yorkers is contaminated.
We find whipping bows (Ever the Actor), wind instruments ( Bird and The Serpent)pianos with tinkling sounds (Iron City) and even digressions between playful bongos and calypso pulsations (Wake Up). A brilliant mockery of one’s own elitism. There is no shortage of acoustic inlays of unsuspected prog derivation (So Rides the Reindeer) or choral architecture (Enemy)but the rhythmic and martial DNA of the group pulsates intact under the skin, as certified by the blade of Wings On Fire.
Recorded in the belly of the Lower East Side, a return to Manhattan that smells of atonement after a decade and visually framed in the cover by Addie Wagenknecht’s museum aesthetic, the album finds its conceptual climax in the final Sudden.
Here the definitive diagnosis is made: any pain that seems to appear out of nowhere is, in reality, a sediment that has lurked in the shadows for years.
This is why the mirror weighs a ton: it reflects the crushing load of every compromise, of every unresolved truth that we carry inside us before we even have the courage to admit its existence.
Interpol doesn’t need to reinvent itself. He just needs to keep digging.
And I keep listening…
SCORE: 8.00
THE VOTES OF OTHERS
New Musical Express (NME) – Rating 9.00
Mojo – Rating 8.00
Clash Music – Rating 8.00
Uncut – Rating 8.00
Pitchfork – Rating 7.10
TO LISTEN NOW
Wings On Fire – Ever The Actor – Enemy – Bird and The Serpent
TO BE SKIPPED IMMEDIATELY
Of course nothing. An hour of gravitational dark introspection.
