(Credits: Far Out / Paul Banks)

Asking an artist to pick a favourite from their own discography is a challenging task. Not only does every song feel like their child, having been conceived, crafted and carefully raised up to the best of their abilities. However, each song is also entangled with its own personal contexts and insider awareness of what went into the piece or what was going on as it was made. For Paul Banks, it’s that context that makes one Interpol track stand out as an enduring favourite.

While often discussed as part of the 2000s New York Scene captured in Lizzy Goodman’s era-defining biography, Meet Me In The Bathroom, Interpol was always a little different. Sure, they were around and gigging during the indie sleaze heyday, but their sound refused to be tied down by a singular moment or musical trend. Informed by rock, punk, grunge, and beyond, Interpol endured far beyond the scene.

That’s also partly down to the band’s set-up. There is no primary songwriter in Interpol as all the members contribute to crafting their songs, meaning that the band is forever being refreshed and spurred forward by varied influences and broader inspiration. It’s meant that over their seven albums and years of work, they’ve never stagnated.

With several albums to choose from and a lengthy legacy, choosing one favourite piece wouldn’t be an easy task for any Interpol fan, let alone a member. But Banks’ answer came back clear and decisive in conversation with Shortlist.

“I’d say ‘The New’ from our first album,” he said, picking out the 2002 Turn On the Bright Lights track. It’s an underappreciated cut that was never a single, but for Banks’ it represents a really special moment for the group right at the start of their journey.

“Always been one of my favourite songs,” he added, explaining, “[It] just represents a real freedom that existed in our early writing – It came from a place somewhere between not knowing what we were doing, and knowing EXACTLY what we were doing.”

That’s precisely what makes debut albums so special and often makes them an artist’s best work. Acts have their whole lives to make a debut, delivering it without the pressure and expectation that come from already having a reputation or a known sound or a quality bar to uphold. Instead, a debut can be made with “real freedom”, as Banks described, where the musical world is their oyster, and everything is ready to be discovered.

A debut is also often the first time a band link up with a producer for a longer project and set up shop at a studio for a while In Interpol’s case, that was Gareth Jones and Peter Katis at Tarquin studio in Connecticut. With more space, equipment and expertise at their disposal, their debut and tracks like ‘The New’ became the direct result of that experience.

For Banks, ‘The New’ will always sound like that moment when his band were on the verge of their breakthrough but had all that hope and excitement in their pocket with no pressure to dampen it.