The early aughts ushered in bands that mined the past to redefine the future through a revival of garage rock, psych rock, and post-punk, among others. And frankly, that’s what every generation has done since the inception of recorded sound. The Rolling Stones evolved from an r&b and blues band into the archetypal druggy rockers of myth in a nearly flawless ten-year run during the 1970s. The point is, music evolves with and within each generation, and (sometimes) within bands. So the next time you read an edgy take on rock being dead because Coachella only booked pop acts, consign it to the bonfire of indifference it deserves.
The Black Angels emerged from Austin, Texas in 2004 and immediately drew comparisons to the 13th Floor Elevators, also a psych rock band from Austin, but from the 1960s. It wasn’t a resemblance The Black Angels ran from: They were the backing band for Elevators frontman Roky Erickson when he toured in 2008. The Angels’ name and logo reference The Velvet Underground, the ’60s New York art scene brooders whose sound also left a mark on the Angels. Their dirge- and rhythm-heavy dark tones made for perfect mood music in television and films (True Detective, Silicon Valley, Assassin’s Creed), which in turn helped catapult them into the zeitgeist alongside other acts taking similar yet wholly different approaches to the genre.
During a run of six albums spanning 2006-2022, band members also helped found the Reverberation Appreciation Society, a record label and curator of the Levitation psychedelic music festival, which holds events annually in Austin, Chicago, Vancouver and France. While psych rock gave rise to Levitation, the line-up oozes a hipster cool that other festivals that aren’t the dearly missed All Tomorrow’s Parties (another Velvet Underground reference) don’t quite manage.
Along with early-aughts trailblazers such as The Strokes, The White Stripes, The Black Keys and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol took the post-punk revival route, while embracing a darker vibe. Let’s get this out of the way: Interpol started out sounding like Joy Division. But they outgrew those boundaries and have put out more music than Joy Division ever had a chance to.
Interpol’s debut album, Turn on the Bright Lights, was released to near universal acclaim in 2002. For many, it stands as one of the albums that defined the new millennium, along with The Strokes’ Is This It? While both bands inhabit a morosely jangly, borderline-bouncy sonic realm, they sound nothing alike. And both represent a past that, to the people who count that time as formative, feels closer than it actually is.
In Meet Me in the Bathroom, the 2017 book by Lizzy Goodman and companion 2022 film documenting New York’s revived music scene after 9/11, Interpol are a central focus at a moment of wartime anxiety, urban gentrification, emerging party scenes, and the redefinition of cool in the glow of uncertainty surrounding a changed New York. While some of their contemporaries have fallen off a bit, there is renewed interest in groups such as Yeah Yeah Yeahs and LCD Soundsystem, who took lengthy sabbaticals before returning to public life.
Interpol and The Black Angels have, for their part, largely kept at it with little drop-off in output, be it through their main bands or extracurricular activities. Interpol released the Other Side of Make Believe in 2022 and celebrated 20 years of their sophomore album Antics in 2024.
Both bands have made a huge impact on the scenes they came from and arguably helped create. And when future critics and historians write about early 2000s rock ’n’ roll, Austin and New York will rank alongside the storied Los Angeles and London scenes of the ‘60s and ‘70s.
Scenes are born because some kids got bored and decided to make the music they weren’t hearing. If you as a listener are lucky, you get to watch the scene grow up and the bands evolve, step by step, song by song. If they’re lucky, they get gobbled up by the mainstream and become someone’s soundtrack, the circle complete.
Interpol and The Black Angels perform 8pm Saturday, March 7 at the James L. Knight Center in Miami. interpolnyc.com, theblackangels.com ~ Tim Moffatt
