No one from the New York indie underground showed up as well-dressed as Interpol did in 2002, but it didn’t take long for the band to prove they were more than the sum of their suits. Turn on the Bright Lights, the band’s seminal debut, turned 12 this year, and yet its stark, winding compositions sound as eerie, eviscerating, and paradoxically fun as ever. Interpol bred post-punk with post-rock and ended up with a startlingly durable hybrid.

It’s strange to think that Interpol’s new record, El Pintor, is only their fifth. They feel like a band that never quite went away and never really revamped the strategies they started with; the suits stayed on, the riffs stayed echoey and huge. Despite their detachment from the indie music culture that bubbled and evolved around them, Interpol are still a fixture. For those of us who started really hearing music around the same time Interpol started really making it, they’re a core figure in our cultural identities.



To celebrate a whole new batch of Interpol songs arriving in the world, we revisited their back catalog and picked out the tracks that meant the most to us. Turns out these sharp-suited perma-creeps can still ring up the chills for hours. Here’s their best.

–Sasha Geffen

Associate Editor