It’s impossible to talk about Interpol without mentioning the immediate impact they had

on rock’s last revolution. At the turn of the millennium, rock had stagnated by the end of

the grunge era, and to get the genre out of the gutter, it took two revival movements.

The first, and more commercially and critically successful, was the garage rock revival,

spearheaded by other huge bands like The White Stripes and The Strokes. The other

was the post-punk revival, which was started and ended essentially by two bands,

Interpol and The National.

Interpol in particular, with their debut album Turn On the Bright Lights, brought back

the heyday of post-punk’s paranoid instrumentation and eccentric vocals, while also

showing a knack for unique songwriting.

Modern-day indie rock has a lot to thank Interpol for, especially for building onto it,

but the question this time around is can Interpol, once giants of the movement, stay

relevant? The answer, apparently, is a resounding yes.

El Pintor initially suffers from a few design flaws. There really is no beginning or ending

to the album, rather it works as a collection of songs thrown together however the group

wanted them to be. You could shuffle the entire track listing multiple times, and it would

have absolutely no impact on its structure. As a result, it sounds a bit like Interpol has

ditched innovation for perfection, focusing more on the music sonically than anything

else.

This does, however, work to the album’s advantage. The lead single “All the Rage

Back Home” is an absolute monster of a track swelling from personal conflicts to

universe-spanning sounds and back down to a simplicity. “Desire” features the type of

painstaking vocals that made Paul Banks a household name in the early ‘00s; “Breaker

1” is a sweet slice of Television-esque riffs; and “Tidal Wave” holds a hook that’s hard to

not like. More than anything, Interpol seems to have moved past the disappointments of

Our Love to Admire and their s/t to get back to their awesome, dark roots.

Many people will not be looking at El Pintor to be a return to form for a band whose

quality has dropped while it’s influence has grown. The problem with that is that they’ll

be missing out on one of the best comebacks of the year, one that’s catchy, cool and as

smooth as anything they’ve put out in the past.