El Pintor
A sleek, revitalized return to form. Sharp, interlocking guitars and driving basslines deliver a dark, high-energy tour of the city after midnight.
A sleek, revitalized return to form. Sharp, interlocking guitars and driving basslines deliver a dark, high-energy tour of the city after midnight.
Stripped-back rebirth
Cold, wet asphalt reflects the glare of passing headlights as sharp, interlocking guitars slice through the dark. A driving bassline pulls you down narrow city streets after midnight, thick with tension and late-night energy. It feels like a sudden rush of cold air, revitalizing and sleek, restoring a familiar, shadow-drenched urgency.
A thick wash of reverb heavy production wraps around the lean instrumentation, casting these direct rock anthems in a vast, cathedral-like shadow.
Many critics warmly welcomed El Pintor as a sleek, rejuvenated return to the band's signature post-punk sound, finding it to be their most cohesive and inspired work in years. While the majority appreciated this creative renewal, some reviewers felt the album occasionally struggled to move past self-imitation.
“All coiled, icy riffs and sonorous vocals”Read review
“El Pintor is an Interpol album that does exactly what it says on the tin, with no alarms and no surprises”Read review
“There’s no missing the excellence of songs”Read review
“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”
“Interpol don’t sound as much like Interpol as they do a band that really wants to be Interpol”Read review
“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”Read review
“Ultimately, ’El Pintor’ serves as a sharp jolt off the path of steady decline that the band’s New York peers like The Strokes and The Walkmen have been on since the late noughties”Read review
“As an exercise in getting back to where you once belonged, ‘El Pintor’ is highly successful”Read review
“Interpol is reborn—older, wiser, and learning to take each crisis in stride”Read review
“Interpol sound more connected to each other as players and songwriters, the result of making music in closer quarters and in the midst of unfamiliar footing”Read review
“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”Read review
“They sound like a band honing in on their skill rather than overhauling what they do, and in the grand scheme of their career this feels a timely release”Read review
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