In his first meeting with Interpol, Matador Records co-founder Chris Lombardi likened them to “four businessmen who happened to be in the business of making music.” He was referring more to their industrious hustle than their suits; though Interpol were deadly serious about proving they were as tight of a brand as they were a band, the fact that they happened to dress like they arrived straight from Wall Street brokerage firms was a coincidence. From the severe typeface and color scheme to the beautifully bleak sound itself, Turn On The Bright Lights presented a unified front, an aesthetic so fully formed that copycats would inevitably soon dilute the brand and cut into market share. And so Interpol wisely got back down to business on Antics, proving that there was no suitable substitute for Interpol, except for more Interpol.
Released 20 years ago this Saturday, Antics was met with a shockingly reasonable reception for a highly anticipated sophomore album that didn’t try to exceed or upend expectations. The critical praise felt like something you’d see for an iPhone update: savvy, sleeker, more aerodynamic. In other words, more of the same, yet the latest model still felt essential. Compare this to the volatile reputation of its closest analogue, The Strokes’ Room On Fire: Cautiously acclaimed as a merely great album from a supposedly generational band, bemoaned as a relative commercial flop but eventually inspiring a contrarian faction who think it’s actually better than Is This It. The slow-burn success of Turn On The Bright Lights outpaced its backlash and Antics has sold almost as well as its more well-renowned predecessor. While it made admirable showings on year-end lists, Twitter does not break out into semiannual arguments about how it’s Interpol’s true masterpiece.
I’d argue that Antics benefitted from a curious discrepancy between the perception of Interpol Music and Interpol itself. In 2004, no one could possibly call Turn On The Bright Lights underrated, but there’s an argument that Interpol were. In the same breath that people would describe their debut as a visionary, decade-defining instant classic, there was a skeptical undertone suggesting it happened in spite of the people who made it. They bought low on Joy Division and Chameleons UK and Echo And The Bunnymen stock and sold high to people who weren’t around for the original article. They were a pure product of their environment, arriving at just the right distance from 9/11 for their elegiac NYC boosterism and their softcore S&M to satisfy media narratives of What America Needs To Heal. There were the countless Carlos D rumors and, hey, maybe we’ll look back on Paul Banks’ lyrics as being actually quite dumb and not profound.
About those lyrics…in 2021, Pitchfork ran an infamous “Rescored” column that knocked Turn On The Bright Lights down from a 9.5 to a 7.0. Once instrumental in establishing the website’s tastemaking reputation, Interpol’s debut was deemed to be at the level of the most recent Post Malone and Killer Mike albums. “Obviously no one listens to garage-rock revival bands for the lyrics,” they wrote, which sorta gives away the game as a literal and figurative settling of scores. Does this rule extend to the Strokes’ “Someday” or White Stripes’ “Same Boy You’ve Always Known”? Every Arctic Monkeys song? Since when are Interpol garage-rock revival? Either way, their take in 2021 wasn’t that uncommon in 2002: “There was something about how poetic and dour they thought they were that drove me nuts.”
Few critics can resist the temptation to project intention onto artists, and Interpol certainly encouraged that “poetic and dour” reading with the suits and the grandiose reverb and the “Stella Was A Diver And She Was Always Down” of it all. But any band that cares that much about presenting a certain image has to be self-aware about it. And I’d argue that Antics’ greatest triumph is proving that people misunderstood or just willfully ignored Interpol’s sense of humor. Maybe it wasn’t meant to be that deep.
Antics lacked more obvious, superficial forms of audacity — “electronic elements,” a newfound interest in krautrock, etc. — preferring to add in notes of doo-wop organ (“Next Exit”) and psychedelic Motown (the swirling strings of “Length Of Love”) that spoke to their origins palling around at Manhattan hotspots like Pyramid and Bar 13 that played soul music to indie kids. As evidenced by Paul Banks’ future endeavors, there was far more going on beneath the hood than mere post-punk cosplay.
But Antics tried a more subtle and daring angle to defy expectations: imagining how people might’ve received Turn On The Bright Lights if it didn’t have “NYC.” You know, the emotional core of the record, the one that R.E.M. saw fit to cover, the song that drove countless people who otherwise never gave a fuck about Manhattan hipsters to tears. Plenty of Interpol songs sounded serious, but “NYC” made them sound important, less like Joy Division, maybe more like U2. But what if “Obstacle 1” went straight into “PDA” and then “Say Hello To The Angels”? This is what the kids might’ve called “indie sleaze” if that term existed in 2002.
Indeed, lead single “Slow Hands,” while reprising an image of emotional baggage from “Obstacle 1,” played as delirious death disco, reflecting Interpol’s current status as a midway point between Franz Ferdiand and the Killers on iPod Minis. “The subway she is a porno,” that was somehow an expression of the heavy-hearted civic pride that many New Yorkers felt in 2002. “I was in that weird, college-age headspace, and that was one of those ways to make a heavy-handed generalization about an aspect of culture,” Banks explained in 2012, before revealing his true intentions. “The point with a lot of the [lyrics] is for listeners to go: ‘What the fuck does he mean?'” And so, two years later, rid of his undergrad pretensions, Banks is free to watch the “pole dance of the stars” and hammily declare, “You make me wanna pick up a guitar, and celebrate the myriad ways that I love you.”
While Turn On The Bright Lights was inextricable from its surroundings, and was lent an added veneer of authenticity and urgency by those surroundings, Antics is simply an elegantly wasted post-punk pop record existing entirely within Interpol World. It’s a place where Paul Banks’ five-dollar words are the only currency — and like most foreign languages, it contains plenty of rich phrases that don’t entirely translate to English. Banks is no longer running into bearded Polish outlaws and unstable butchers and catatonic sex toy lovers, the characters you only meet on the Lower East Side. He’s now parking a damn yacht at the Himbodome on “Take You On A Cruise” — “Time is like a broken watch/ I get money like Fred Astaire.”
Recognize Banks as someone scripting a character, taking a wry and surreal look at a guy who realizes he may have bullshitted his way to the top, and the actual emotional undercurrent of Antics comes to the fore. As he often would throughout the past 20 years, Banks adopts the guise of someone who isn’t entirely convincing himself he can play the rogue: “The trouble is, you’re in love with someone else…it should me,” he cracks on “C’mere,” which ties in quite nicely with him saying minutes earlier, “Your hair so pretty/ Can’t you feel the warmth of my sincerity?” This might not even be the best line on “Not Even Jail,” having to compete with the following come-ons: “Girl, you shake it right/ I will bounce you on the lap of silence” and “I’m subtle like a lion’s cage/ Such a cautious display.”
Yet, if there is an undercurrent of insecurity, or the sense that the good times are killing him — closer “A Time To Be So Small” hints at “cadaverous mobs” in their circle — you know who does think Antics is the best Interpol album? Paul Banks. One would think Interpol didn’t lack confidence on Turn On The Bright Lights, not when they already saw themselves as requiring their own entrance theme song; “Untitled” was basically their version of “Sirius.” Still, on that first go-round they showed up to Peter Katis’ studio with about $900 in cash and only a faint idea of how to make an actual album. Banks still shouted through a distorted microphone like he was in their original practice space; other times, he was submerged in reverb and delay.
Compare “Untitled” to “Next Exit,” a similarly-intentioned overture: Banks is high in the mix, using his voice like an instrument with newfound nuance, taking on a playful tone when justified — “Do this thing with me instead of tying on a tight one tonight.” “Untitled” created an air of mystique, but now here’s a band that knows the city will welcome them with open arms. “Wherever we went, people were greeting us like warriors who had just come back from a winning a war,” Carlos D recalled, and during that victory lap, they debuted nearly half the songs that would appear on Antics. They had good reason to believe that it would be received as a Greatest Hits, and indeed, “Evil” remains their most successful song on both Billboard and streaming. In Banks’ view, Antics rises above the Interpol discography because they discovered what it meant to make Interpol Music.
Perhaps the best endorsement you can give to Antics is that Interpol have spent most of the past two decades trying to replicate this album rather than Turn On The Bright Lights. Witness how they followed up their one truly off-brand move — the opulently produced major-label one-off Our Love To Admire — by returning to Matador and making two technically self-titled albums. Or, without Antics, maybe Interpol carry on in a far more diminished form, trotted out at Cruel World to do Turn On The Bright Lights playthroughs. Instead, they played for approximately 160,000 people in Mexico just this year; though they still do brisk business in the States, drummer Sam Fogarino recently joked that if he had his way, Interpol would exclusively tour Latin America. If not necessarily an essential album in the scope of 2000s indie rock, Antics is the essential Interpol album for solidifying them as (sigh) a business, man…a Godiva or BMW or Ritz-Carlton, a reliable paragon of accessible upscale decadence. “I will surprise you sometimes”…but if the customer’s always right, most of the time, Interpol won’t.
