But if we had been angling for some sort of massive fame we would've written different music. I remember Daniel once broke down the ideal path, which is somewhat what we've ended up following, but as far as ambition and expectation, I hoped for some success when we first started, but once the first record came out you had to just say, 'Well, who the fuck knows where this is gonna go?' And then it just happened to go extremely well over the course of those first two albums. PB: I think we did have some long-term discussion very early on as far as an ideal career path. Pitchfork: Now that you're on your third record, do you guys still feel any pressure at this point? Was there an imagined trajectory for the band at all? Are you where you thought you'd be? The idea of some other band coming in and finding one of our images and then, instead of stealing it, going in and re-shooting it- it sounds to me like it's totally a coincidence. I wonder whether or not we left an image lying around and somebody stole our shit, but apparently it's from a slightly different angle than our photo is, so who knows? It could be pure coincidence, or they stole our shit and just wanted to do another photo. Pitchfork: Had you seen that before then? PB: Yeah, I heard about that you guys had a big story up about it. Pitchfork: Have you seen the cover of the Ola Podrida record that features the same exhibit in the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County as the one in the Our Love to Admire art? Now, into the third record, we can do whatever the fuck we want. We don't have any reason to maintain some sort of visual thread. And nobody in the band made a peep when we started talking about going in a vastly different direction. But this time around I was very eager to approach it in terms of pure design I'm sort of a design buff. I really loved how minimal Antics was, and the color scheme worked great because those colors work with us and our sound and our visual and everything. People understand who we are and what we do, and in our minds we were never limited to a particular sound or a particular design scheme. Now I think we have a lot of leeway and freedom to do whatever we feel like creatively because our identity has been established. The minimalism of the design on both those records served a purpose for us as far as how people first met the music in the visual realm. It was very appropriate for everything in the beginning as we introduced our music to the public. For the time it certainly was, but as far as from here on out we never said that it was going to be the visual aesthetic for our design. If we had just kept with it, wouldn't that be kind of lame? We never really looked at that as a branding thing, the red and black. Pitchfork: Why did you decide to ditch the red-and-black color scheme you had on the Turn on the Bright Lights and Antics covers for the Our Love to Admire art?

They present themselves to the public now with less of their old monochromatic NYC mystique and a little more focus on their individual personalities, not the least of which has to do with the rise to prominence of bassist Carlos D and his many hobbies: classical composition, film work, tending to his Italian Greyhound Gaius, and growing one hell of a moustache.Д«efore the release of the new album, we spoke to frontman Paul Banks about how the band has evolved, why they ditched their old color scheme, how their very capable rhythm section affects the songwriting and recording processes, and Banks' first musical love: 'hip-hop.' Three albums into their career, the biggest change in their aesthetic is non-musical. With Our Love to Admire, Interpol have tackled the problem of what to do on a major label debut by incorporating a little extra studio trickery into their tried-and-true formula.

Interpol our love to admire album cover