If fate didn’t quite ordain the circumstances for Interpol’s seventh album, it was at least fortunate that the band had happily concluded their Marauder cycle on stage in front of 30 thousand Peruvian fans. Rather than be sent scrambling like so many other musicians on tour or promoting new music, when lockdown clamped in March 2020, Interpol quickly got into a productive mood.

Coming from a group whose early work was characterized by Polish knife-wielders and incarcerated serial killers, you might expect Interpol’s pandemic record to be an emotional tar pit, doubly so given the presence of towering producer-engineer duo Flood and Moulder on the boards. But Paul Banks felt the call to push in a “counterbalancing” direction, with paeans to mental resilience and the quiet power of going easy. “The nobility of the human spirit is to recover and rebound,” he says. “Yeah, I could focus on how fucked everything is, but I feel now is the time when being hopeful is necessary, and a still-believable emotion within what makes Interpol Interpol.”

Imbued with pastoral longing and newfound grace, The Other Side Of Make-Believe also explores the more sinister undercurrents of the present day. Daniel Kessler's serpentine guitar arrangements crest skywards on "Into The Night," Samuel Fogarino shatters his percussive precision into strange meters, while Paul Banks’ vocals exudes a deep, yearning vulnerability.