Suits. Gnomic poetry. Moody, insistent riffs. It used to be that you’d know what to expect from NYC rockers Interpol. The band’s first two albums, in the early 00s, were blockbuster successes, shifting half a million units each thanks to dramatic songs also fit for jerking around at an indie disco. Interpol duly jumped up to a major label, but then quickly fell back down again. Their talismanic bassist Carlos Dengler quit, and the band settled into a decade of solidly successful but pretty predictable albums. The most recent, 2022’s The Other Side of Make Believe, only reached No 178 on the US charts.

So it’s a bit unexpected that their upcoming eighth album, This Mirror Weighs a Ton, is their masterpiece. “We just all really showed up,” frontman-guitarist Paul Banks says of a band that has swelled to a quintet as two touring musicians, bassist Brad Truax and keyboardist Brandon Curtis, become full-time members. “The lyrics on the last record, it’s really hard for me to identify with what I was doing,” Banks continues. “I felt as if I made some mistakes.” What were they? “I don’t want to draw attention to them! I just didn’t want to walk away with that feeling again.”

The indie disco hits are back – Wake Up even shimmies to the sound of bongos – and the rest of the album has a vast emotional and tonal depth, aided by producer Andrew Wyatt, who won an Oscar for co-writing A Star is Born’s Shallow, co-created the zeitgeist-dominating Barbie film soundtrack and worked on Rosalía’s Lux. There’s a trip-hoppish opener, jazz-fusion synth soloing, everything from xylophones to woodwind and, in Enemy, the rare sound of a rock band making a brilliant piano ballad. As well as the intimate human dramas of old, the lyrics confront the inferno of our contemporary moment, from war in Ukraine to AI.

Banks makes for wonderful company at lunch in a central London hotel, with long, searching ruminations about his work plus the occasional peppery aside: “You ever see Fawlty Towers?” he says sotto voce after a bumbling waiter leaves. “It’s giving Manuel.” He’s visiting from Berlin, where he lives with his fashion designer wife Juliet Seger and two young children. His hair has some rumpled edges but he still wears a smart shirt collar under his dad-core pullover. “Having children, to me, is maximum fulfilment,” he says. “Having this being that feels so safe that they fall asleep in your arms, it’s just so powerful and beautiful. And if I’m going to have a job that keeps me away from my family sometimes, then I don’t want any mediocre work. I feel this responsibility of being a better version of myself.”

But, he says, “the wish to feel complete, I don’t think anything can really fix that. As a younger man, I was thinking it would be via love. Now I think you need more than that.”

***

Interpol were always the most melancholic of their peers in the 00s NYC scene that spawned the Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and LCD Soundsystem. Back then, “through longing and loneliness, I found a way to bring my sadness up a little bit, by being creative”, Banks says. “It takes struggle and suffering to make an artist want to create. The other thing is that it’s really fun.”

Daniel Kessler, who I speak to later that day over the phone from New York, feels the same way. “When I am writing stuff” – Interpol songs almost invariably start life with a Kessler chord progression – “it’s like: if I don’t do this, I’ll be miserable, and something could be become repressed in me. Being in the band, writing music together, it definitely exorcises angst, moodiness, depression. It’s visceral.”

Kessler says Interpol sat apart from those other 00s buzz bands: “This camaraderie, this CBGB sort of scene of everyone being in the same place, that wasn’t happening for us.” But despite Kessler feeling “very shy in social situations, the same sort of shyness I felt when I was a little kid”, he and the band weren’t moping in the corner. “We were debauched, for sure. Definitely decadent. Carlos was very good with this stuff: what’s the next thing to do after the gig? It was fun in a way I don’t think would exist now.” Why not? “Social media,” he says, presumably meaning that you can no longer party in private. “And even the way people choose restaurants now: they examine what they’re going to order before they go. I will romanticise New York in that [early-00s] time period: unbelievable nights would happen because you were just going with the moment.” For Banks, New York was, and is, “a ley line of creativity, a chakra point of human force – it supercharges you”.

This group of emotional young men inevitably had their ructions: the departed Dengler has described having PTSD. Were there moments of serious tension? Banks drops his voice into a low, harrowed register. “Yeah. Yeah. The years before Carlos’s departure, and then on and off since then. There’s who you think you want people to be – and then there’s who they are.”

But fatherhood has made him “a little bit more loving and a little bit less prone to holding on to grievances”, and his unlikely partnership with Wu-Tang Clan leader RZA – they released an album as Bankz & Steel in 2016 – also helped. “RZA just wouldn’t fight stuff. If you don’t like it, OK, cool, let’s do something else. Here’s somebody who never gets bent out of shape about anything, and yet their creativity flourishes.” Banks quotes the Clive Owen movie Croupier: “‘Hold on tightly, let go lightly.’ There’s great wisdom there.”

Interpol have done anniversary tours of old albums and are playing UK arenas this autumn with fellow 00s NME favourites Bloc Party. I wonder if Kessler is worried about becoming a nostalgia act, but no: “It’s super flattering that people care about something you did a couple of decades ago. I’m happy to play anything.” As a kid, he “hated it when bands would begrudgingly play old songs live – I felt like they put like a gash on something I really loved”.

And while he admits he’s “looking for some new chapters” in his life at 51, “I get to be a sort of sailor who sees the world.” Interpol seem to have weathered their last album flopping: they just played arenas in Australia and New Zealand with Deftones, and in 2024 amassed a crowd of 160,000 people when they played a free concert in Mexico City’s biggest public square. They’ll soon earn gen Z fans by supporting pop star Sombr on tour. Kessler is also upbeat on the prospects for drummer Sam Fogarino, who played on the new album but is out of the touring lineup as he recovers from spinal surgery: “He’s really in a good place.”

***

Still, This Mirror Weighs a Ton is often as heavy as its title implies. The song Iron City, Banks says, is “a dialogue between a narrator and a future artificial intelligence that is protecting the human family that remains – or not”. He jokes about worrying whether to write about AI: “Don’t talk shit about it, otherwise it’s going to run your car off the road in 15 years’ time. But if there are repercussions for being open and honest about how fucked up things are, then bring it on. Fuck you! I’d rather go out in defiance.

“AI is always waiting for us to throw the stick for it to go and chase,” he continues. “It can only pull from everything that has thus far existed, and that photocopy of a photocopy will eventually start to be really dull and have no bearing on the human experience. So you can’t do it without us.”

Darker still is Wounded Soldier, inspired by drone footage from the Russia-Ukraine war. How horrifying it is, I say, that you can log on to social media and suddenly witness the last moments of a soldier, “just blowing his head off rather than letting the drone blow him up”, Banks interjects. His voice trembles slightly. “You can’t get desensitised to that stuff. Maybe it is the old cliche of being a parent, of feeling just how precious every life is, but it’s just so sad, what we do.”

For all the specific subjects, Banks’s lyrics remain poetic and ambiguous. Language, and how it carries meaning, seems to be his chief fascination. “The power of words is boundless. And there are so many people who have no scruples about what they’re saying and what it does to the world.” Specifically the Trump administration. “How can Marco Rubio or JD Vance say what they say, when they’re clearly smart? It’s so dark, dude. How do they look in the mirror?” Or Elon Musk: “When Nancy Pelosi’s husband was bashed in the head with a hammer [in 2022], Musk reposted some tiny hack news article suggesting that it was from some guy from a gay bar. That’s dangerous and crazy – and I kind of used to like him.

Interpol didn’t used to write political songs (few people did, at the time). “I don’t like politics, I like the human spirit,” says Banks. The absurdity of today’s political landscape changed that. ”We live in a world where all of these arguments come down to how you can shape the hearts and minds of people who are susceptible to rhetoric,” he continues. “I feel bad for people who give the benefit of the doubt to evil men because they can’t fathom that someone could be so evil. They’re good people, and it couldn’t even enter into their consciousness that a person could be so damaged that they will actually hurt history. That someone would lie so much about an election. Because he’s the president.”

So he writes to honour the richness and potency of language, in a world where it is deliberately corrupted. “There’s that Kafka quote, that good writing should be like a sledgehammer to the frozen pond of the mind,” he says. For Banks, the challenge is taking the “cosmic energy” of life, “and siphoning it out into the world in these small pellets of meaning, from the words that we have, with 26 letters. You need to freshen up and revitalise how those words work to have any chance of expressing the deep essences of what it is to be human. I’m almost trying to make sure we remember not to let language, or the vehicles with which we express ourselves, get stale. Because they’re very powerful, and they can be a lie.”

These are serious aims, and I sense Banks is on an equally serious mission to try to fully understand himself. He reiterates that his kids “give me a real sense of fulfilment. But as an artist I’ve also really held on to this childhood sense of: I want it all. For a lot of artists, there’s this real need to be seen and heard. I try not to manifest it, but I relate to this idea that sometimes even negative attention is attention: Trump gets off on that.” Needy people like this, he says, sometimes “make something terrible happen so there’s a confrontation and then they feel seen. I still sort of grapple [with that] and have that in me, this childish insatiable need for something. And I don’t know what it is any more. I don’t think it’s recognition – I’ve come to terms with whatever degree that is, or was, or is going to be.”

Whatever that need is and wherever it comes from, Banks says he tries to fill it with his art. With a wry smile he gives an example of being in high school, gazing at a girl in a cafe. “I’ve never had game; even my wife made the move with me. So I didn’t say anything to this girl and it just deeply, deeply hurt. Many times, the longing about some woman really hurt bad. I felt that if I go home and pick up a guitar and make something beautiful, that will make me sort of worthy in the universe. Maybe that’ll do the job of making this woman notice me! And also, maybe it’ll fill this huge hole: I’ll feel valid and worthwhile if I create something beautiful. Desiring to take this chaos and put something beautiful there, I still feel that. I still like that.”

• This Mirror Weighs a Ton is released on 28 August via Partisan