Photo Credits: Interpol
The indie rock band Interpol was vital to the early post-punk revival era. Formed in New York City in 1997, they quickly stood apart for both their fashion and their music. Wearing full suits and ties and playing in a cinematic, brooding, and heavily layered style they contrasted against the grittiness of other punk bands. Their new album ‘This Mirror Weighs a Ton’ follows the typical punk rock formula, mixing lyrics laden with the weight of social injustice with distorted riffs and raw vocals. This album reflects on the dangers of surveillance states and the prevalence of AI and harmful media and our active part in it.
‘This Mirror Weighs a Ton,’ the album namesake, experiments with synths, using them in a surprisingly modern fashion. The lyrics themselves explore the easy, reliability of social media and online culture: “If we want to plug in/ The hardness, the feeling/ To turn into silence/ Then we won’t survive.”
‘Iron City’ explores the relationship between artists and AI. “I was here before; you can’t use me anymore/ I have saved your life and left you there, inspired.” The lead singer, Paul Banks, remains positive, saying, “It’ll be human creativity that’s always ahead of the curve. It’s the young artists’ job to work in reaction to the status quo, so they’ll always be breaking new ground that the computer won’t have the human side to make something that feels essential. In a military space is where it’s all a bit sketchier.”
Piggybacking on that last quote, ‘Wounded Soldier’ explores the dangers of the new technologies of modern war and the psychological effects of war seen through media. “Evil knows/ It will spread like a chain reaction/ To be shown.”
The whole albums reads as a kind of giant existential crisis. I dig it. As usual, I find that bands like this cover social commentary that seems to get ignored in other areas of media and pop culture.
Banks says about the album, “I think there’s sort of the self-reflection that a band can go through, or the self-reflection that a nation can go through, and sort of evaluating who are we and, again, similarly, there can be a distorted reality via manipulative narratives, or there can be the honest look. And I think it’s just a very interesting thing the way that it’s very difficult to find universal truths in almost anything and that the world in this moment in time is sort of further than ever away from having kind of a sense of shared common reason.”
