Interpol – ‘This Mirror Weighs A Ton’ review: existential anthems and their best since ‘Antics’

A chandelier of CCTV cameras hangs down from the cover of Interpol ’s eighth album, a portrait of both the band’s DNA and of this record.

Their sound has always been one of elegance, but coloured by the gloom of a very urban modernity.

On ‘This Mirror Weighs A Ton’, the New York indie heroes are feeling watched by the modern world, while also reflecting on their own worth.

READ MORE: Interpol tell us about new album ‘This Mirror Weighs A Ton’: “We just felt, ‘Let’s make this one count’” There are generally more eyes on Interpol in 2026.

Their new record label Partisan (also home to IDLES , Geese and PJ Harvey ) reports that more than half of the band’s 2.5million monthly Spotify listeners are under the age of 35.

It’s a rare feat for a band of their vintage to have a following beyond 6 Music dads, but there’s a new generation taking up front rows of gigs, devouring their pristine tailored aesthetic, discovering the scene-defining ‘ Turn On The Bright Lights ’ and ‘ Antics ’ as the modern-day classics they are, and turning sleeper hits like ‘Rest My Chemistry’ into actual hits.

After 2022’s esoteric and textured ‘ The Other Side Of Make-Believe ’ was written with the band apart during lockdown, they yearned to make something more live and physical, to be “loud in a room together”, as frontman Paul Banks told NME .

Adding to this overall compulsion, ‘This Mirror…’ marks their first album to be recorded in their native NYC in over a decade.

Assisted by producer Andrew Wyatt (formerly of Miike Snow and now behind huge records by Liam Gallagher , Rosalía and Charli XCX ) and with longtime touring member Brad Truax stepping in to write basslines with the kind of purpose missing from the lower end of their sound since the departure of the vampiric Carlos D in 2011, you can see they laid the table for their vow of: “Let’s make this one count”.

The title track is to be filed alongside ‘Untitled’, ‘Next Exit’ and ‘Pioneer To The Falls’ in their lineage of excellent cinematic openers.

Banks, with some heavenly backing vocals from his wife Juliet Seger, sings of the heavy burden of having a word with yourself above a hypnotic Massive Attack -esque nocturnal groove to create a huge sense of space.

Then fellow lead single ‘See Out Loud’ fills it with that classic Interpol post-punk propulsion as the singer gets lost looking for escape in the abandon of a very, very late night (“ I start to feel pixelated as we get buried in the sound ”).