Festival organisers are adding another big name to the line-up of headliners – this time for lovers of guitars, post-punk and indie rock. The New York band INTERPOL will return to the Czech Republic after six years and will present their last album ‘The Other Side of Make-Believe’ live in Ostrava in July.
On it, the trio consisting of guitarist Daniel Kessler, virtuoso drummer Sam Fogarino and singer with an unmistakably colored voice Paul Banks presented themselves in top musical form and confirmed their cult status among their fans. The band INTERPOL has never been boring to their fans, because they have approached each new stage in the past twenty-six years as if they were just starting. INTERPOL still sticks to its sound manifesto – the successful debut Turn on the Bright Lights from 2002 ranked among rock classics.
Last year’s seventh album ‘The Other Side of Make-Believe’ was recorded by the band, produced by Mark “Flood” Ellis (Nick Cave, Nine Inch Nails, PJ Harvey), remotely during the covid pandemic. It was rightly described in reviews as a hedonistic work delivering an “aggressive moody collection of brutalist romanticism and morbid guitars”. The darkness and gloom of Interpol have always been balanced by melancholic tenderness and engaging lyrical moods of often cocooned lyrics. “We are storytellers from the ground up. We write about what we believe in and we hope the fans will follow us. And so far it’s coming out. Out of respect for them, we sing about what is authentic,” says their author Banks.
Interpol are the biggest they’ve ever been. They just needed to make a record that would highlight all of their forms – the dramas and the emotions: the strongest record, the saddest record, the most positive record…
James Sandom – Interpol’s manager
