IF YOU REALLY LOVE NOTHING

Paul Banks is one of the most serious frontmen going, with a mostly fixed stony expression, sort of like Daniel Craig’s harder cousin, and a haircut that rides a line between roman gladiator and ill-advised late-night dare. He’s complicated, in other words, as is the band.

I saw them at The Horseshoe in Toronto more than twenty years ago, when they were touring in support of their first album, which was about to take off. I lost track of them in their middle years, but Marauder, the 2018 album from which this song and video is taken, and The Other Side of Make-Believe from 2022, are a return to exquisite form and relevance that I didn’t see coming. If anything, I like these last two albums even more than I did the first two.

It’s a very good video as well, perhaps because I don’t spend any time in bars these days, and scenes filmed in them are so rarely convincing. Kristen Stewart’s appearance here feels entirely organic, as if she just happened to be there drinking. It doesn’t hurt that she and Banks might as well be siblings, so well do they share that air of invincible, melancholic cool.