Despite its upbeat subtitle – Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City – Lizzy Goodman’s 2017 history of the Strokes et al, Meet Me in the Bathroom, ends up an oddly depressing read. At its conclusion, virtually all of the major players in the story – from the Strokes to Yeah Yeah Yeahs – find themselves in reduced circumstances. Damaged by their own excesses, overtaken commercially by cannier, hungrier artists – the gimlet-eyed Killers and Kings of Leon, the nerdy but organised Vampire Weekend – things just haven’t worked out the way they once expected them to.
Interpol’s dalliance with a major label ends prematurely and badly, having failed to catapult them into arenas. They end the book talking the pragmatic, defiant, but downcast language of a band digging in for the long haul, aware that their golden moment has passed and facing the future with lowered expectations: albums that get reviewed respectfully but without any real excitement; gigs that sell tickets to diehard supporters and people who only really want to hear songs from your first two albums; solo projects that go almost unnoticed, and play-the-classic-in-full anniversary tours. “Man are we lucky these people want to come and see us.” “We have fun.” “Having outside interests helps.”
Of course, it’s better to be realistic than delude yourself, but anyone who’s read Goodman’s book might find Marauder a surprise. Judging by their comments in Meet Me in the Bathroom, not even Interpol would have imagined their sixth album could sound this revitalised and emboldened. At least part of its success is down to Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev producer Dave Fridmann, whose fingerprints are all over certain aspects of it, not least the way the rhythm section is scuffed with a layer of distortion, as if everything is in the red. But it’s mostly down to Interpol themselves. Sixteen years after their acclaimed debut, Turn on the Bright Lights, they appear to have unexpectedly hit on a variety of ways to broaden their sound without losing its essence.
The spindly, reverb-laden guitars of The Rover or Surveillance could in theory have appeared on their debut, but they feel noticeably more grownup and expansive, less concerned with asserting their place in an august lineage of angst-ridden alt-rock with Joy Division and the Chameleons. There’s a sunlit buoyancy about the melody of Surveillance that would never have been permitted in the austere, nocturnal world conjured up by the Interpol of the early noughties.
The kind of icy detachment that was once Interpol’s raison d’etre – this is, after all, a band who called the opening track of their debut album Untitled – is notable in its absence here. Instead there’s a real immediacy even about its most oblique moments. On opener If You Really Love Nothing, airy vocals drape themselves beautifully over muscular glam-rock drums. The best thing here might be Stay in Touch, a song that unfolds slowly, punctuated by a rhythm track that adds prickly urgency: the drums don’t so much underpin the tune as slip and slide around it, never quite landing where you expect them to.
It also sounds remarkably like the work of a band who’ve learned from their mistakes. Around the time of 2007’s Our Love to Admire, the album on which Interpol made their major-label assisted push for mainstream success, frontman Paul Banks’ default vocal setting was a stentorian bellow, which fitted with the booming, stadium-ready sound constructed by Muse producer Rich Costey. Here, there’s more light and shade on display: Mountain Child gets its emotional impact from the cooing tenderness of Banks’s voice during the verses; Party’s Over features him singing in a fragile falsetto.
Similarly, if his tendency to imponderable, portentous symbolism hasn’t been entirely excised – “the pink house returns to gloom and becomes the fundamental,” he sings at one juncture – it’s now outweighed by more direct, personal and affecting lyrics. The title of It Probably Matters sounds like an expression of shrugging Brooklyn hipster insouciance, but the song turns that idea on its head. Banks appears to be addressing his dissolute younger self and his offhand treatment of others in a tone of anguished mortification: “I didn’t have the grace or the brains … I was pawning my days away.” In fact, Banks is very good throughout Marauder on the subject of regarding your past and involuntarily cringing at instances of unthinking behaviour, posturing indifference and missed opportunities: “Who reigns in that silence when you sleep in the afternoon?”
It’s among the factors that make Marauder a mature album, rather than the work of people hemmed in by their past, cowed by the sense that they can never hope to be as exciting as they were on arrival. That’s something that most of their noughties NYC peers have thus far failed to achieve. It’s the sound of a band who have done the last thing you might expect them to do at this stage of their career: start moving on.
This week Alexis listened to
Carmel: Georgia
Perfect end-of-the-summer aural balm: a hazy reverie of half-heard voices and beautiful, distant electronics.
