There are certain bands where you know what you’re going get. While other acts may play around with styles or bop from genre to genre at a dizzying rate, there are other groups who are comfortably, reliably familiar. Ever since their now classic debut Turn On The Bright Lights, Interpol have been one of those bands.

Even the departure of band members, or being forced to write and collaborate remotely due to the pandemic (which is how the band’s last album, The Other Side Of Make-Believe, was created) have never robbed the band of their essential ‘Interpol-ness’. Basically, if it doesn’t conjure up images of walking around Manhattan in the darkest of evenings, is it really an Interpol song?

That said, This Mirror Weighs A Ton does feel like a bit of a reset. For the first time since 2014’s El Pinto, the band reassembled in New York City to write and record the album with Andrew Wyatt, a producer who has never worked with the band before, but has known lead singer Paul Banks since his collaboration with RZA, and it’s clear from the opening title track that he knows exactly how to frame an Interpol song.

That title track is a magnificently brooding way to open the album – a beautifully atmospheric five minutes that features Banks’ wife Juliet Segar on backing vocals. It’s a slow burn of a song with Daniel Kessler’s guitar sounding particularly effective. It’s one of the best songs of their career.

Elsewhere though, things are very much back to normal. See Out Loud is an urgent, driving rocker that could easily have sat on Antics, especially when Banks introduces the song with a typically doomy intonation of “5AM, teeth-marked skin”. The vocal interplay between Banks and Kessler (making a rare vocal contribution) gives the track another dimension.

Although everything still remains very recognisably ‘Interpol’, there are more than a few stylistic changes that pay dividends. So Rides The Reindeer features an acoustic guitar, and eschews big choruses in favour of mood, while Bird And The Serpent is ambitious post-rock, which exhilaratingly develops into an ever more intricate arrangement where guitars and synths seem to do battle against each other.

There are even a couple of piano ballads. Enemy is a beautifully simple ballad which, at points, sounds rather like The National, with some cinematic strings. Iron City has a similar sense of grandeur, but feels doomier, with Banks singing of being “alone in Central Park, when nothing seems to happen”. Again, the sound is classic Interpol but with a few added bells and whistles.

But they’re at their best when they let rip. Wings On Fire is a big, furious singalong number with a chorus that stays with you for days, while Wake Up builds up quite the head of steam, with some particularly impressive drumming from Sam Fogarino.

Ultimately though, This Mirror Weighs A Ton isn’t a radical reinvention of Interpol’s sound, but it doesn’t need to be. They’re the ultimate example of ‘it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ and, when the formula still sounds this fresh and compelling 24 years on, there’s simply no point in breaking out the toolbox. By subtly introducing new little embellishments to the Interpol sound, they’ve produced their best album since Antics.