If fate didn’t quite ordain the circumstances for Interpol’s seventh album, it was at least fortunate that the band had happily concluded their Marauder cycle on stage in front of 30 thousand-odd Peruvian fans. Rather than be sent scrambling like so many other musicians on tour or promot-ing new music, when lockdown clamped in March 2020, Interpol quickly got into a productive mood. Coming from a group whose early work was char-acterised by Polish knife-wielders and incarcerated serial killers, you might expect Interpol’s pandemic record to be an emotional tar pit — doubly so, given the presence of towering producer-engineer duo Flood and Moulder on the boards. But Banks felt the call to push in a “counterbalancing” direction, with paeans to mental resilience and the quiet power of going easy. “The nobility of the human spirit is to recover and rebound,” he says. “Yeah, I could focus on how fucked everything is, but I feel now is the time when being hopeful is necessary, and a still-believable emotion within what makes Interpol Interpol.”

A1. Toni
A2. Fables
A3. Into The Night
A4. Mr. Credit
A5. Something Changed
B1. Renegade Hearts
B2. Passenger
B3. Greenwich
B4. Gran Hotel
B5. Big Shot City
B6. Go Easy (Palermo)