Interpol are back, baby! To be fair, the atmospherically decadent New York rock elders have never exactly gone away. Just two years ago, Interpol played the biggest show of their career, with more than 200,000 people watching them in Mexico City. But they’ve been touring especially hard lately, playing festivals and debuting new songs live. Now, they’re announcing their new album This Mirror Weighs A Ton, the follow-up to 2022’s The Other Side Of Make-Believe.
This Mirror Weighs A Ton is Interpol’s first LP for their new label home Partisan, and they recorded it with big-deal producer and Miike Snow frontman Andrew Wyatt at his downtown Manhattan studio. Legendary indie psych-rock mastermind Dave Fridmann mixed the LP. The image on the cover is an Addie Wagenknecht work that’s in the Whitney’s permanent collection. A press release makes a big deal out of the LP’s use of sound design.
Wyatt, a longtime friend of the band, says, “I wondered what it would be like to keep the parts perfectly legible, because everyone in that band writes such great parts, and to add some different spatial dimensions to it. It was something almost a little bit more like chamber music — the musical ideas bear scrutiny without needing the sonic treatment of it to carry all the weight. It was also nice to add a trick or two I picked up over a couple decades of making pop records.”
Along with the album announcement, Interpol share the first two tracks from This Mirror Weighs A Ton, the title track and “See Out Loud.” Interpol debuted the latter song at a São Paulo show earlier this year, and it features guitarist Daniel Kessler’s first vocal since he sang on “PDA” from Turn On The Bright Lights. Kessler says, “I was right next to Andrew when he started doing these incredible things with the sound design, and it was just so exciting. I remember thinking, I don’t have context for what kind of music this is — these big crashes happening before Paul even had a vocal. Logic would have said maybe this is an instrumental. Then Paul just got up, went into the back room and started singing those melodies — and suddenly it was clearly not going to be.”
Below, check out both of those songs, along with the tracklist for This Mirror Weighs A Ton and Interpol’s upcoming tour dates.
TRACKLIST:
01 “This Mirror Weighs A Ton”
02 “See Out Loud”
03 “Iron City”
04 “Wounded Soldier”
05 “Wings On Fire”
06 “Ever The Actor”
07 “So Rides The Reindeer”
08 “Darling Thoughts”
09 “Wake Up”
10 “Enemy”
11 “Bird And The Serpent”
12 “Sudden”
TOUR DATES:
7/31 – Denver, CO @ Mission Ballroom %
8/02 – Jackson Hole, WY @ Snow King Mountain %
8/03 – Boise, ID @ Revolution Concert House %
8/04 – Salt Lake City, UT @ Red Butte Garden %
8/06 – Portland, OR @ McMenamins Edgefield ^
8/08 – Tacoma, WA @ Dune Peninsula ^
8/11 – San Francisco, CA @ The Warfield &
8/14 – Santa Barbara, CA @ Santa Barbara Bowl &
8/15 – San Diego, CA @ The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park &
8/16 – Las Vegas, NV @ The Theater at Virgin Hotels Las Vegas &
9/26 – Brooklyn, NY @ Under The K Bridge, CBGB Festival
9/29 – Vancouver, BC @ Rogers Arena *
10/02 – Toronto, ON @ The Bowl at Sobeys Stadium #
10/03 – Montreal, QC @ L’Olympia #
10/04 – Boston, MA @ Roadrunner #
10/06 – Pittsburgh, PA @ Stage AE #
10/07 – Cleveland, OH @ The Agora #
10/09 – Detroit, MI @ Masonic Jack White Theatre #
10/10 – Columbus, OH @ KEMBA Live! Outdoors #
10/11 – Chicago, IL @ The Salt Shed Fairgrounds #
10/13 – St. Louis, MO @ The Factory #
10/15 – Atlanta, GA @ The Eastern #
10/16 – Atlanta, GA @ The Eastern #
10/17 – Nashville, TN @ The Pinnacle # ~
* with SOMBR
% with Youth Lagoon
^ with Loathe
& with julie
# with DIIV
~ with French Police
This Mirror Weighs A Ton is out 8/28 on Partisan.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source stereogum.com ’
