With El Pintor, its first album since the 2010 departure of founding bassist Carlos Dengler, Interpol is reborn—older, wiser, and learning to take each crisis in stride.
Their belief regained and creative juices flowing at a rate of knots, Interpol have delivered their finest record in a decade with El Pintor.
El Pintor is a huge improvement by a band that, perhaps without the added pressure to once again succeed, would have instead spiralled further into irrelevancy.
El Pintor is sleek, minimalist and brilliantly realised, and is the band’s best work since Antics.
El Pintor is immediately as comfortable and as welcome as a threadbare and favourite jumper but it only takes one entire and single minute to hear a new, renewed aerated energy to the band.
It’s a characteristic success and a massive delight to the fans that their return as a three-piece yields something as excellent as ‘El Pintor’. The band that could once do no wrong returns, doing a hell of a lot of things exactly right.
An elegantly simple, aggressive album that understands and acknowledges its own past without nostalgia or bloat.
Expansive and texturally advanced, and arguably their strongest outing since that lauded debut, this is a welcome second coming.
El Pintor finds Interpol returning to the sleek, monochrome post-punk that caused such an impact in the early 2000s.
It would be hard to argue that Interpol are as vital as they once were - even with such an accomplished new work under their belts - but, fifth time round, they're proving there's still plenty of value in their elegantly downtrodden aesthetic.
The band sound so in their element—both in performance and song craft—that it ultimately just allows them to come out sounding more original than ever.
Ultimately El Pintor feels a like a blast of icy fresh air after a sticky, sweltering summer’s day.
Interpol have learned to do more with a smaller bag of tricks, which means novel twists on the post-punk protocol are more noticeable than ever.
You either like the band’s light-in-the-darkness version of post-punk, or you don’t. If you do however, and felt as though their self-titled was the sound of a band falling apart, El Pintor is a mostly refreshing re-pasting of the pieces that made them so compelling to begin with.
Even if it doesn't have as much of the jagged need that sparked their best work, El Pintor is Interpol's most consistent album since Antics
A successful exercise in getting back to where they once belonged.
No, El Pintor isn’t as good as Turn on the Bright Lights. But it’s quite good, and this new-look version of Interpol sounds like their next move will be even better.
Interpol still have a masterful touch with their lavishly romantic guitar fantasies: Daniel Kessler rings the chimes in his six-string cathedral, while Paul Banks rounds up another album's worth of miserable ladies to sing about.
El Pintor is ultimately more pleasurable than it is painful, enough of a distraction to recall how important Interpol seemed at one time and how they can still pull off the illusion of importance after all these years.
While El Pintor is no Turn on the Bright Lights or Antics, the record finds Interpol climbing out of their mediocre rut, slowly but surely.
Like an ailing canine after a reinvigorating trip to the veterinary surgeon, El Pintor has a bit more bite to it than some of Interpol's recent efforts.
El Pintor isn’t a rekindling of old fires, more so a chilled, mutual acceptance from a band that is letting things roll as smoothly as can be.
After an odd fourth album, Interpol returns to form with an incredibly safe record on El Pintor.
With El Pintor, Interpol don’t sound as much like Interpol as they do a band that really wants to be Interpol; it’s a sad notion for anyone who once held this band’s music dear to their hearts
Even if the album boasts a few diverting spins of lugubrious post-punk, the weight of these spins is diminished by the knowledge that nothing is at stake, that the wearied dissatisfaction they promulgate has never and seemingly will never contribute to biographical change.
When I was "all the rage back home" that meant that I was first in line for the human pinata list, where I was to be beaten with backyard sticks by savage, rabid three year olds with anger issues and a net worth exceeding well over $2000 (if that's not telling, idk what is). It wasn't fun but one day I fell on top of one and they got scared of me since. Might've crushed that fuckers foot but he probably deserved it.
This is a HUGE improvement from their previous records! "El Pintor" is a beautifully produced, well written and meticulously crafted record that takes the sound from "Turn On The Bright Lights" and upgrades it to make it fresh again. This could've been their sophomore record and it still would've succeeded!
Fav Tracks: Tidal Wave, All The Rage Back Home, Everything Is Wrong, My Desire, My Blue Supreme, Anywhere
Least Fav Track: Twice As Hard
Score:
8.7
Exceptional
Turn on the Bright Lights 3
It's back to basics for Interpol with "El Pintor", getting rid of all of those elements that held back the previous two albums, and instead, this time around stick to doing what they do best... and that's "Turn On The Bright Lights".
And for as much as it may sound as if the album is just a straight-up re-hash of their debut, it still brings some new elements to the album and it actually stays fresh and fun for most of the time. It does have a ... read more
El Pintor is SUCH a breath of fresh air from Interpol's previous album (self-titled). Some people may see it as boring/repetitive, but I see it as a nice and mellow change. I'm a huge fan of the different guitar riffs featured on this album and it pulls me in a lot - especially on My Desire and Same Town, New Story.
When I first heard this album, I knocked on it but now that I've come back and listened to it a couple more times I can say it's really great! For it being their first album after ... read more
1 | All the Rage Back Home 4:22 | 90 |
2 | My Desire 5:00 | 86 |
3 | Anywhere 3:12 | 83 |
4 | Same Town, New Story 4:09 | 77 |
5 | My Blue Supreme 3:09 | 77 |
6 | Everything Is Wrong 3:32 | 82 |
7 | Breaker 1 4:13 | 78 |
8 | Ancient Ways 3:00 | 73 |
9 | Tidal Wave 4:17 | 86 |
10 | Twice As Hard 4:56 | 74 |
#4 | / | Gigwise |
#5 | / | Noisey |
#12 | / | Q Magazine |
#13 | / | Drowned in Sound |
#15 | / | CraveOnline |
#19 | / | musicOMH |
#32 | / | The Skinny |
#44 | / | Rolling Stone |
#49 | / | NME |
#77 | / | Under the Radar |