Elon Musk was branded ‘dangerous and crazy’ by Interpol frontman Paul Banks during an interview in London this week, as the New York singer discussed how the tech billionaire and the Trump era jolted him into a more openly political stance on the band’s new album, This Mirror Weighs a Ton, due for release on 28 August.
For context, Banks had long insisted that Interpol were not a political band, preferring oblique heartbreak and urban alienation to topical rants. The group, who broke out of New York in the early 2000s with their first two albums each selling around half a million copies, spent the past decade releasing what even fans quietly called solid but predictable records. Their last album, 2022’s The Other Side of Make Believe, stalled at No 178 in the US charts, a sobering low for a group once bracketed with the Strokes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
Elon Musk Becomes A Lightning Rod For Paul Banks
The news came after Banks was asked about language and responsibility, and he did not bother to soften his view of Elon Musk or the politicians who orbit Donald Trump. Referring to Musk’s reaction to the 2022 hammer attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Banks recalled how Musk reposted a fringe article that implied a salacious backstory rather than a straightforward assault.
‘That’s dangerous and crazy – and I kind of used to like him,’ Banks said, using Musk as shorthand for a wider collapse in scruple among powerful men online.
He put Trump’s allies in the same basket. ‘How can Marco Rubio or JD Vance say what they say, when they’re clearly smart?’ he asked, calling the situation ‘so dark, dude’ and questioning how they ‘look in the mirror’. For Banks, these are not abstract gripes. They go to the heart of what he thinks lyrics should do in 2026, when words can tilt ‘the hearts and minds of people who are susceptible to rhetoric’.
IBTimes UK cannot independently verify Banks’s assessment of Musk as ‘dangerous and crazy’, so everything should be taken with a grain of salt. What is clear, however, is that Musk and Trump have become creative foils for a songwriter who once insisted that he ‘didn’t like politics’ and preferred to write about the human spirit.
Banks now argues that the absurdity of contemporary politics has made disengagement impossible. ‘I feel bad for people who give the benefit of the doubt to evil men because they can’t fathom that someone could be so evil,’ he said, referring to those who still struggle to believe a president could ‘lie so much about an election’. That unnamed president is plainly Donald Trump, whose language he sees as a kind of template for the current malaise.
From Indie Discos To A ‘Masterpiece’ In The Age Of AI
For starters, Interpol were once the sound of moody young New York, all sharp suits, gnomic lyrics and riffs built for indie discos. Their first two albums made them unlikely commercial heavyweights, then came the comedown. They jumped to a major label, bassist Carlos Dengler quit, and the band drifted into what Banks now sees as a decade of competent but compromised work.
The new record, Interpol’s eighth, is, in his own words, different. ‘We just all really showed up,’ he said, crediting the creative jolt partly to new full‑time members, bassist Brad Truax and keyboardist Brandon Curtis, and partly to a harsher self‑audit. ‘The lyrics on the last record, it’s really hard for me to identify with what I was doing,’ he admitted. ‘I felt as if I made some mistakes.’ Asked what those were, he demurred. ‘I don’t want to draw attention to them! I just didn’t want to walk away with that feeling again.’
The result, he argues, is a record that ranges from trip‑hoppish opener to jazz‑fusion synth solos, xylophones, woodwind and, in the song Enemy, a rare attempt at a straight piano ballad from a rock band. There is still club‑ready swagger, with Wake Up even shuffling along on bongos, but the lyrical focus has widened to take in war in Ukraine and artificial intelligence.
On Iron City, Banks said, the narrator speaks to a future AI ‘that is protecting the human family that remains – or not’. He jokes about the risk of irritating an emerging technology. ‘Don’t talk shit about it, otherwise it’s going to run your car off the road in 15 years’ time.’ Then he shrugs at the idea of self‑censorship. ‘If there are repercussions for being open and honest about how fucked up things are, then bring it on. Fuck you! I’d rather go out in defiance.’
His view of AI is sceptical rather than apocalyptic. ‘It can only pull from everything that has thus far existed,’ he said, calling it a ‘photocopy of a photocopy’ that will eventually become ‘really dull and have no bearing on the human experience’. Good art, in his view, still needs human mess.
Elon Musk, Trump And The Fight Over Language
In case you missed it, language itself is Banks’s real obsession. Over lunch in a central London hotel, he talked at length about words as tools for both liberation and manipulation, quoting Kafka’s line that good writing should be like ‘a sledgehammer to the frozen pond of the mind’.
He worries that people such as Trump and Elon Musk prove how easily language can be twisted. ‘The power of words is boundless,’ he said. ‘And there are so many people who have no scruples about what they’re saying and what it does to the world.’ He describes today’s politics as a contest over ‘how you can shape the hearts and minds’ of citizens who simply cannot conceive that a leader might be intent on ‘actually hurt[ing] history’.
Banks’s solution is to double down on precision. With only 26 letters to play with, he talks about trying to ‘freshen up and revitalise how those words work’ so that lyrics can still capture ‘the deep essences of what it is to be human’. If language stagnates, he argues, it becomes not just dull but actively dishonest. In that sense, Musk’s off‑the‑cuff post about Pelosi’s husband is not just a bad tweet, it is an example of how easily a platform can launder fringe narratives into the mainstream.
His bandmate Daniel Kessler, speaking separately from New York, is more haunted by mood than by Musk. Writing music, he said, is a way to avoid ‘repressed’ angst and depression, an escape hatch from a life that could have become quietly miserable. Yet both men are, in their different ways, reacting to the same climate. Social media has killed off the private hedonism of their early years, Kessler suggested, and replaced it with a 24‑hour performance. ‘It was fun in a way I don’t think would exist now,’ he said of early‑00s New York nights, long before every moment could be filmed, shared and litigated.
Banks, now a father of two living in Berlin, feels the weight differently. Parenthood has made him ‘a little bit more loving and a little bit less prone to holding on to grievances’, but it has also sharpened his horror at what scrolls past on his phone. A new song, Wounded Soldier, was inspired by drone footage from the Russia‑Ukraine war. He recalls seeing a clip of a soldier apparently choosing suicide rather than being blown up by a drone. ‘You can’t get desensitised to that stuff,’ he said, his voice shaking. It is not just the violence that upsets him, it is how casually it is served up in timelines, sandwiched between jokes, adverts and, yes, Musk’s latest quip.
In that environment, calling Elon Musk ‘dangerous and crazy’ is less a throwaway insult than a line in the sand. For Banks, the stakes are not simply artistic, they are about whether words still mean anything at all.
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