Last month, Interpol staged a press conference in Mexico City to announce their forthcoming new album, Marauder. It turns out that the streamed event was also part of a music video shoot for the record’s lead single, “The Rover”, a clip that has just been revealed.
The video finds director Gerardo Naranjo (Narcos, Fear The Walking Dead) following actor Ebon Moss-Bachrach (Netflix’s The Punisher, HBO’s Girls) through the Mexican capital. It seems Moss-Bachrach was meant to be Interpol’s new keyboardist, but things got testy as they drove through town. Kicked out of a moving van, the lost man becomes The Rover, a cult-like leader of the youth who explores the city in a Rules of Attraction-like whirlwind. It all culminates back at the aforementioned press conference, where Moss-Bachrach confronts Interpol frontman Paul Banks in a very intimate fashion.
In a press release, Banks commented on the video:
“I like to describe the video for ‘The Rover’ as a prequel. It’s the origin story of the character described in the song, the birth of a cult leader. When we meet him he is partly unhinged. He’s a man on the verge, an artist subjected to great pressures, and beset with existential frustrations. A distracted hipster who enjoys psychedelics, let’s say.
The events that take place in Mexico City, be it a bump on the head, a visit to a shaman, or the influence of his rescuers (the street gang known as ‘Los Locos’) trigger the birth – the eruption – of this new figure, ‘The Rover.’ His rescuers become his first followers. In the end of the video he exacts his ‘revenge’ on Interpol with a mischievous act of disruption during the press conference. He grabs me by the head – to save me? Forgive me? Or simply as a gesture of his new independence – the butterfly becoming.”
Check out the video below.
Marauder, the follow-up to 2014’s El Pintor, is due out August 24th. Interpol just wrapped a European tour in anticipation of the record (which included an appearance with The Cure in London), and they’ll support it with a North American leg come August and September. For more of the new album, check out the live debut of the album track “Now You See Me at Work”.
