Given Interpol’s taste for the dismal post-punk of the early 1980s, there can be few who won’t suspect the title of their second album is ironic. They may have emerged alongside the Strokes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but Interpol’s New York has always been a bleaker, colder city, where Joy Division cast a long shadow and men in their thirties nurture the flour-faced pallor of moody teenagers.

Yet while Antics is a serious album — the lyrics deserve York Notes — it does have more lightness of touch than Turn on the Bright Lights. The frisky backbeats of Evil and C’Mere suggest that inside every Joy Division there is a New Order just waiting to get out, while the magnificently moping single Slow Hands is pallid pop noir: gauche and gloomy in equal parts. Even slow-burning songs such as Length of Love shimmer gracefully once your ears become accustomed to the dark.

An Interpol track once appeared in the soundtrack to Friends, and despite their drab suits, the band are clearly unafraid to get down with the mainstream. In combining black-clad cool with some monumentally danceable pop songs, Antics is a record that is both conceptually fine and very fine indeed.

(Matador)

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