New York indie-rockers Interpol look back on the time their second record leaked a week after they'd finished it

Every band who have a big-hitting debut, as Interpol did with the louche, post-punk-tinged indie-rock of their 2002 Turn On The Bright Lights , are both eager and anxious to see if their follow-up can connect in the same way. For the New York then-quartet, though, that moment arrived prematurely when second album Antics leaked months before it was scheduled for release. It did nothing to harm the record’s impact, sealing Interpol’s reputation as one of the most exciting guitar bands of the ‘00s and an album that remains as exhilarating and brilliant almost two decades on. It turns 20 later this month, an anniversary Interpol will celebrate with a UK and Irish tour in November.

But back to that leak: a few years ago, guitarist Daniel Kessler told this writer about the odd sensation of your brand new record being out there when it shouldn’t be. “Antics leaked 10 days after we finished it,” he recalled. “It was 2004 and we were about to go on tour with The Cure and Mogwai. It leaked and you’d go to every city and someone would be talking about your record. You're like, ‘Yeah, it's not coming out for another three months!’. But I never got upset about that. I was pretty accepting and I felt pretty grateful that with Bright Lights …, I’d got to go through a record industry that had more in common maybe with The Beatles than it does with what was happening at that moment as far as the cycle of how people discover things, which is pretty crazy.”

Kessler said he drew positives from their second record being spread far and wide thanks to the fledgling file-sharing community. “I looked at it very much that as much as it'd be nice if this hadn't happened, on the flip side, it's pretty cool that some kid who lives on the far reaches, middle of nowhere with no cool record store near them but has a certain tastes music and knows what they like, they're not punished for that, they can find it in a drop of a hat just because of their own intuition. I felt like it was amazing to have that, to be able to reach those people.”

Interpol's Antics 20th anniversary tour weaves its way through Europe in October, reaching British and Irish shores at the beginning of November.