Interpol - This Mirror Weighs a Ton [Indie Exclusive]

Twenty-four years after Turn On The Bright Lights, Interpol still sound like nobody else, and This Mirror Weighs A Ton is the album where they stop apologising for it. Paul Banks, Daniel Kessler and Sam Fogarino have spent two decades being told they peaked in 2002. This record answers by leaning further into what made them distinctive rather than chasing anything current.

Kessler's guitar remains the band's signature instrument, all high, chiming intervals that outline chords rather than play them, and here it is given more space than on the last several albums. The title track opens things at a deliberate pace. "Iron City" and "Wings On Fire" are the most propulsive moments, and "So Rides The Reindeer" is the strangest, a title only this band would use with a completely straight face. Banks writes in his usual mode of oblique menace, images arriving without explanation and landing anyway.

The record runs twelve songs across four sides, which gives the sequencing room to breathe. Lacquers were cut by Joe Nino-Hernes at Sterling Sound Nashville, and the pressing has the low-end weight the band's music has always needed and not always received.

This is the limited translucent red double LP pressing on Partisan Records, made in Poland.