Interpol recorded Turn on the Bright Lights in November 2001, roughly six weeks after the World Trade Center fell. The songs had all been written before that morning. That gap, between composition and recording, between the world the music came from and the world it landed in, is the whole story of why the album sounds the way it does.
By the fall of 2001, Paul Banks, Daniel Kessler, bassist Carlos Dengler, and drummer Sam Fogarino had spent years testing these songs at small Lower East Side venues, Brownies, the Luna Lounge, the Mercury Lounge, tightening them until the arrangements had the locked, almost combative precision of a band that had nothing to prove to each other and everything to prove to everyone else. When Matador Records signed them, the label sent them not back into the city but away from it, to producer Peter Katis's home studio in Bridgeport, Connecticut, a place Katis himself described as a run-down house surrounded by dilapidated buildings and lonely strip-malls. The band slept, drank, and recorded in the attic. They had brought $900 in cash to cover the cost of two-inch tape. Katis didn't get paid for a year.
The financial constraint shaped the record as concretely as any aesthetic choice. With no budget for elaborate overdubs and no time to second-guess, Katis pushed the band to record live in the room together, capturing the performances as they happened. As he later recalled, many of the bass and guitar tracks on the album are the live takes, with at least one or two live guitar parts preserved on most songs. The reverb that critics would later call luscious, the deep, cavernous sound that makes "Obstacle 1" feel like it's being played inside a cathedral, came from Alesis MicroVerbs, cheap $50 units the band had brought with them. Katis noted that cheaper reverbs have a darker, messier quality, and that without those little pieces of gear, the record would have sounded completely different. Grandeur, it turned out, was a side effect of poverty.
The sessions were tense in ways that went beyond budget. Fogarino, who was six to ten years older than the rest of the band and the only member with prior studio experience, described the interpersonal friction as real and ongoing, particularly with Dengler. But that friction had a sound. The push and pull between the band's personalities gave the record the tight, disciplined quality that made it feel simultaneously expensive and frayed. Kessler's guitar work, which Banks called "signature Daniel," opened the album with "Untitled," a track Kessler had originally written just to introduce the band at live shows, a slow-build of descending guitar delay and silence that announces something without explaining it. British producer Gareth Jones, who had worked with Wire, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and Depeche Mode, came in afterward to assist Katis with mixing on select tracks, adding a final layer of considered craft to what had been recorded under pressure.
And then there was the city they had left behind. Dengler watched one of the towers collapse from his rooftop. The band briefly considered not making the record at all. Fogarino remembered it feeling like everything was trivial. They went anyway. The songs they had written about urban alienation, about the city's capacity to hollow people out while holding them captive, suddenly had a context that none of them had intended. The track "NYC," whose lyric "it's up to me now, turn on the bright lights" gave the album its title, had been written as a kind of bruised love letter to a city that never quite delivered what it promised. After September, it read differently. As Dengler put it, the songs were written before 9/11, but the unintentional meaning they take on is no less real. He called it insane, like the universe had been preparing something.
Turn on the Bright Lights was released on August 20, 2002, on Matador Records, arriving into a New York scene already crowded with urgency, the Strokes had put out Is This It the previous year, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were building toward Fever to Tell, TV on the Radio were forming in Brooklyn. Interpol belonged to that conversation and also sat apart from it. Where the Strokes were lean and insouciant, Interpol were dense and formal, four people in suits playing music that owed as much to Echo and the Bunnymen and the Chameleons as to anything currently happening on the Lower East Side. The Joy Division comparisons were unavoidable and also slightly beside the point. Pitchfork's Eric Carr called the record "one of the most strikingly passionate records I've heard this year," noting a "grander, more theatrical atmosphere." Rolling Stone's Rob Sheffield described the sound as "glacial beauty." The album closed the year at the top of Pitchfork's list and influenced a generation of bands, among them the Killers, Editors, and the xx, enough that critics coined the slightly unfair term "Interpol clones" for the ones who borrowed the aesthetic without the underlying tension.
What the imitators couldn't replicate was the circumstance. The attic in Bridgeport, the $900 in tape money, the band barely holding together in a room while their city was still in shock, these aren't romantic details. They're the actual reasons the record sounds the way it does. "Stella Was a Diver and She Was Always Down" runs to six and a half minutes not because anyone had time to trim it, but because no one stopped it. "Leif Erikson" closes the album with a patience that suggests a band that had already said everything it needed to say and was simply letting the room go quiet. The songs were written before the world changed. The record was made after. The distance between those two facts is where the music lives.
