Twenty years on from their dazzling – if flawed – debut, and with album number seven, Interpol are at a point in their career that they’re unlikely to significantly expand their fan base or win many new converts without some kind of seismic event, like having a track featured on a Netflix smash or similar. And having a well-established fanbase, they’re in a place where they can largely please themselves.
Penned in lockdown, this was the primary aim of ‘The Other Side of Make Believe’: working remotely, they elected to mine a seam of optimism and positivity, presumably as some kind of counter to pandemic panic and the separation anxiety that gripped people the world over, not just bands kept apart.
I write as an intensely avid and longstanding fan of the band, having come to them on the release of ‘Antics’, which I immediately enjoyed, but found fell short of the ‘new Joy Division’ hype I’d been hearing. It’s an album I’ve come to love, of course, but just as there are five – or seven – stages of grief, depending on whose theories you align to, there are several stages of acceptance with a new Interpol album, at least in my experience.
The first is invariably a sense of disappointment, of feeling somewhat underwhelmed. This has been particularly true of recent albums: ‘Lights’ felt like a slow-burner but with bite ahead of their eponymous 2010 release, while ‘The Rover’ was a snarling instant grab ahead of ‘Marauder’. But both albums felt like something of a let-down on first and second listens. Interpol are the kings of the slow-grow, then. Every album, without exception, has revealed more – and more – with each successive listen.
But the arrival of ‘Toni’ came with indifference. I played it once, forgot about it. Played it again a few weeks later, and did the same. Ironically, while Interpol promo videos tend to be poor adverts for the songs, the video was far more striking than the lazy Interpol-by-numbers tune it accompanied. ‘Fables’ landed and felt like a mid-pace album track, like where ‘Memory Serves’ provides an early lull on ‘Interpol’, and ‘Rest My Chemistry’ gives a breather on ‘Our Love to Admire’, and ‘My Blue Supreme’ brings side one of ‘El Pintor’ to a relaxed close. But the trouble with ‘The Other Side of Make Believe’ is that that’s as energetic as it gets. There’s nothing to take a breather from. There are no standouts. It's very much one-tempo, one tone, but worse than that, it’s very much lacklustre and lacking in inspiration or character. ‘I like the inspiration… It’s going in the right direction’, Paul Banks croons on ‘Toni’. It’s soon clear that is really isn’t, and that the inspiration is sadly lacking.
Reviews elsewhere have largely prised the band’s move toward a more upbeat vibe, but fail to balance this against what’s been lost in the shift, not least of all any real sense of identity. The sense of nervous tension driving each song was what made Interpol Interpol. Sounding relaxed, they could be any post-millennium new wave indie hybrid act. ‘Greenwich’ (the album was recorded in London) is particularly unremarkable and swiftly fades into the background.
‘Something Changed’ marks the album’s midpoint and it’s a fair summary that indeed it did, and not for the better. Each track starts – as all Interpol tracks do – seemingly offering potential for something: ‘Renegade Hearts’ in particular seems to offer potential, but it’s rapidly squandered, and the same is true of ‘Gran Hotel’ on early hearings, although it may in time prove to be the album’s stealth success. Then again, the bar is low. It’s no ‘Take You On a Cruise’. Their catalogue is abrim with songs that start unremarkably or hesitantly but blossom into something wonderful, something unexpected, but ‘The Other Side of Make Believe’ brings no such welcome transitions or moments of exhilaration. Each song just plods its way to a predictable ending having not gone anywhere.
Context matters: following the somewhat stilted ‘Interpol’ with its sparse production and brittle tension and fragility, ‘El Pintor’ and ‘Marauder’ have each stepped up the energy, culminating in the raw, ragged rip of the 2019 EP ‘A Fine Mess’. Expectations were moderate to high after a three-year wait, meaning that the arrival of ‘The Other Side of Make Believe’is as depressing as Mansun’s ‘Little Kix, quite possibly one of the most underwhelming and deflating follow-ups to a killer album of all time (although The Cooper Temple Clause’s ‘Make This Your Own’ isn’t far off).
Ordinarily, I’d hold off on the review until I’ve given it time to grow, but ‘The Other Side of Make Believe’ is so limp and so lacking, it has absolutely nothing to inspire repeat listens, and yes, I tried.
Ask me in another year or so and I may feel differently…
