The sold-out crowd packed in tight to see a new lineup for Interpol, one without their founding bassist Carlos D., who left the band just before the release of Interpol in 2010. The touring bassist Brad Truax, whose long, thin hair seems straight out of Heavy Metal Parking Lot, opened the show with the first riff of "Evil," a bass line so instantly recognizable in the band's catalog that the scream of the crowd made it so you couldn't hear anything but the first two or three notes. Banks, guitar strung low, stepped up to the mic, to sing about Rosemary.

It's six days before the release of the band's fifth album El Pintor, and a lyric in "Evil" rings in a new way. Banks writes famously inscrutable lyrics, often fodder in conversations for fans and detractors of the band, but here something was highlighted anew for three guys pushing forward and growing older in New York City: "You're coming with me/ through the aging, the fear, and the strife."

Cut back to 2013, away from lights of all intensities and colors, when Banks decamped to a secluded beach on the Pacific coast of Panama to write the bulk of the lyrics to El Pintor. As he talks about his island getaway, the sun sets over Manhattan in a conference room in the Time-Life building in Midtown, surrounded by windows that look south toward the Empire State Building and further, to the Lower East Side where Interpol formed in 1997. He wears a backwards fitted hat and a remarkable button-down shirt.

"I once heard the RZA talk about this idea of like, there's too much electromagnetic waves in his urban environment and so sometimes you gotta put yourself out, and go somewhere where you're in isolation, to just sort of get all these energies that are bouncing off you all the time, away from you."

Banks has been surfing for almost four years now, his ribs calloused, his duck-diving technique on point. He says that he's been writing away from the city for a while now, in the "middle of f-king nowhere." For a man who writes songs that have a symbiotic relationship with New York City, he finds most of his clarity away from the hum of Manhattan.

"I think the urban setting is great for generating fuel," he says, "but then you also gotta get away from all those electromagnetic waves of people, and more toward those ocean waves." He gives a big, knowing grin.