I realise something’s changed when Paul Banks, frontman of the famously dour rock band Interpol, sends a text message saying that he will be arriving for this interview dressed in a large yellow bear costume and walking with a cane. Perhaps I should have realised earlier, given that the recalcitrant singer now has a Twitter account on which he writes nice things such as: “Thanks so much for all the kind birthday wishes! Made my day!”

When he arrives in the upmarket Italian restaurant in the West Village, Manhattan, that is his local haunt, I ask about the poker faces with which they used to stare off everyone, from journalists to their own audience.

“Have you seen us play lately?” he replies, with more than a hint of a grin. “I’m a little more chipper these days.” Later I will speak to guitarist Daniel Kessler and ask how he feels about releasing their fifth album, El Pintor. “Nowadays we try to write setlists for shows and there are too many songs to choose from, which is a nice problem to have,” he says, sounding unusually happy. Can it be so? Have the moodiest band in New York cheered the hell up?

Interpol formed in the late 1990s, around the same time that the Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Rapture and a bunch of other guitar-led bands were bursting out of the scuzzy bars of the Lower East Side and Williamsburg and on to the pages of NME. A new wave of angsty and sexy rock music was upon us; it felt like a scene. But these bands were hard work to interview, the sort of dour New Yorkers who would tell you something about Nietzsche and then look a bit annoyed when it turned out that you’d done that module at uni, too. They wore a lot of black, had artfully depressed hair, and had something of the night about them. And something of the night before that too. But the songs – oh the songs. And Interpol’s were always the saddest: Stella Was a Diver and She Was Always Down; Evil; Rest My Chemistry. The band began on indie label Matador, moved on to the major Capitol, and lost their enigmatically gothic bassist Carlos D, whom they don’t talk to any more. (“Yeah I call him an asshole but I call my friends assholes,” says Banks. “I love Carlos, we all love Carlos. But I don’t think he wants to see me.”)

In 2007, I flew to New York to sit on a park bench and ask Paul Banks about his singing lessons. “I don’t want to talk about my singing lessons,” he replied. “The media, man – nasty stuff. I detest reading about myself, I hate quotes. I know that we’re not really friends and you could just as easily make me sound like a fucking asshole.” So that was fun. But things really have changed; Banks, who once surprised his more indie fans by releasing a rap mixtape called Everybody On My Dick Like They Supposed To Be (a quote from Rick Ross), is also working on an album with his chess-playing friend RZA of Wu-Tang Clan, though he can’t talk about it yet. But their time together has made him a more positive person.

Banks does, however, shatter my dreams when telling me the New York scene was never like that at all. “Hey I wished it was different, too. I still wish I was more bro-y with those guys. But it wasn’t like: ‘Hey my buddies the Strokes are doing really great’, it was more like, ‘Wait a minute, who the fuck is making music this good? And they’re blowing up.’ The Strokes were apparently hanging out in exactly the same places I was but I didn’t know any of them until everybody in England was, like, up their ass. Had never heard of them doing a gig. Nick Zinner [from Yeah Yeah Yeahs] knew people in my band, and he was part of a scene. But if you think of a lot of internet companies rising up at the same time, they don’t think of themselves as all in it together. They think, ‘Oh my god, did you hear about those guys doing super-well? We’ve got to work on our craft.’”



And work on their craft they did. El Pintor could be called a return to form, if it weren’t that all their albums work on a similar form (they are often compared to Joy Division, although Peter Hook insists that he applied to be Interpol’s new bass player and they turned him down). As Sam Fogarino, the drummer, puts it, “There’s that thing where shooting for originality kind of kills the integrity of something. How about you invite your fans, rather than trying to outwit them?”

They have worked with producer Alan Moulder again, “but this time I said do not be conservative – go to town,” says Banks. “Delay bounces that change, reverbs that swell in the background until the vocal bubbles up. Other mixers I’ve worked with want my voice to ride on top of the mix, but I always wanted more fur on it. But Moulder worked with My Bloody Valentine so I knew he could handle an aesthetic that’s within Interpol that I like. Sonic landscapes that allow dreaminess to be both immediate and distant.”

Banks now plays the basslines on the records; Slint’s David Pajo joined for a bit, and Brad Truax now plays on tour with them, but they’re happy for Interpol to remain as a three-piece. Banks admits they’re a hard band to join; not the most flexible of people, though he and Truax share a lot of private jokes. His girlfriend of the past six years, who happens to be Helena Christensen, had one such in-joke engraved on a silver pendant for him. “I opened it and it said Build A Dome – she was trying to be sweet and cute but I was like, ‘Goddamit woman you don’t listen, it’s Build THE Dome.” Is he joking? I don’t know.

His other love is surfing; he has a beach house in Panama. How life-affirming and sunny it sounds; these guys really have changed!

“No, I’ll wait and ride two waves in a day because the 20 that passed me by were going to kill me. I pulled a dead guy out of the sea the other day.”

Sorry, what? “Yeah, an older guy. His son came and spoke to me afterwards. That sucked. People die all the time at that beach and it’s the only place I surf; it’s crazy dangerous out there.”