INTERPOL - The Other Side of Make-Believe LP (Red / Black vinyl)

Label: Matador

The first album from Interpol in four years, The Other Side of Make-Believe. Rather than be sent scrambling like so many other musicians on tour or promoting new music, when lockdown clamped in March 2020, Interpol quickly got into a productive mood. Coming from a group whose early work was characterized 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 (Nine Inch Nails, Gary Numan, Depeche Mode) 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."