The cover of This Mirror Weighs a Ton is a chandelier made of CCTV cameras, hanging where a normal chandelier would go. It’s a strange, precise image for a band that’s spent twenty-five years being watched closely and, on this record, finally turns some of that scrutiny back on itself.
This is Interpol’s eighth album, their first in four years and their first for Partisan Records after decades on Matador. Producer Andrew Wyatt is a genuine swerve from the last two records’ rough, live-sounding production by Flood and Dave Fridmann, and the album folds in two longtime touring players as full members for the first time: keyboardist Brandon Curtis, and bassist Brad Truax, whose Interpol album debut arrives fifteen years after he first started touring with them.
The title track opens things on softness rather than force, fretless bass and fluty synths giving Paul Banks’ vocal a slow-motion glide it rarely gets: The maniac in your head still sleeps, in archways alone. ‘So Rides the Reindeer’ pulls further away from expectation, Missy Elliott-style beats and handclaps under a bittersweet acoustic line, closer to Gorillaz than anything Interpol have tried before. ‘Darling Thoughts’ hands the spotlight to Truax, whose bassline does more of the song’s actual talking than the guitar does.
‘Wake Up’ pushes that furthest: Talking Heads carnival rhythms, scratchy funk guitar, Banks sounding genuinely playful for the first time on record. It’s the most fun Interpol have ever allowed themselves to sound, and also the one moment where the record risks feeling like a different band entirely rather than this one, expanded.
Kessler pulls it back on ‘Enemy’, laying down tender piano under a spacey, devotional melody that owes as much to Nick Cave as to the band’s own back catalogue. Closer ‘Sudden’ goes further still, a reflective piano ballad that ends the record on its quietest, most exposed note.
Banks told NME this is a “no-skips” album. Twelve tracks and fifty-four minutes in, that claim holds up better than most artists’ versions of it usually do. Even the one genuine risk they take pays off, mostly because a band twenty-five years in finally sounds curious about what else it can be, rather than just comfortable being what it already is.
