How RZA and Interpol's Paul Banks Made Their Unlikely Collaboration Succeed

The duo, under the name Banks and Steelz, discuss their first album, Anything but Words.

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Benedict Evans

When I spent time with RZA during the promotion of the Wu-Tang Clan's reunion album A Better Tomorrow in late 2014, he hinted that he was working on something "unique"—a "collaboration you couldn't even begin to predict," he said.

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That collaboration, with Interpol's Paul Banks, is Banks and Steelz. Out at the end of this week, the duo's first album together is as fresh and unique sounding as it is unlikely. Titled Anything but Words, the album features appearances by Florence Welch, Kool Keith, and Wu-Tang Clan's Ghostface Killah, Method Man, and Masta Killa.

"The responsibility I have in the Wu-Tang Clan weighs heavily," RZA tells me when I meet up with him and Banks to discuss the new album and mention that he seems more relaxed than the last time we met. "I love the Wu-Tang and I enjoy it—I would never dis my band—but there's a lot riding on it, too. This began as something purely creative, with no pressure at all, so that was a very different experience for me."

On the heels of a sold-out L.A. show in late July, Banks and Steelz will hit the road, beginning on August 24th in Seattle, and will play festival dates and tour through October. But first, RZA and Paul Banks tell me how it all came to pass.


"It came about because I met Paul and I dug his style, and we hung out a few times," RZA explains of the genesis of the collaboration, which took place in 2013. "My manager suggested that I should do a collaborative album with somebody, and I really liked that idea. He said, 'If you could do an album with somebody from the rock world, who would you choose?' And he had some names, but I said, 'You know who I like? I like Paul.' I immediately could see myself hanging out with him and it not being work at all."

"It started with just the idea of that we should try to make some music, and I was up for that," Paul Banks adds. "You never know what's going to come out of something like that, or even what it will sound like, but I was definitely game to try and explore a collaborative adventure."

If the collaboration between RZA and Banks seems unlikely, its roots go back to Banks' love of hip hop, something that caused him all sorts of grief when Interpol first hit the scene.

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"I feel like we're both a little left of center," Banks says when I ask him about the obvious reaction to their "odd couple" pairing. "But I think lyrically I've always taken a lot of influence from hip-hop and a lot of influence from, especially, the hip-hop that RZA's been a part of."

"I actually love the collaborative process," RZA adds, adamantly. "I love making movies, and that's the teacher of collaboration, I think. If you don't know it, you'll learn it! When I was making The Man With the Iron Fists, I thought to myself, 'This is my last artistic lesson: to learn humility.' It helped me realize I could get in the back seat and I was still going to reach my destination. And that was a beautiful thing."

"I've been more into hip-hop than rock for a long period of time, because I've felt that it's just a more fertile genre," Banks continues. "I think now everybody can see that but, in the early 2000s, when I was saying it, there was still some argument that it wasn't the sort of music that I should be doing, or even listening to. But I was dead serious about it. I just think music is music. And there really are great melodies in RZA productions."


It was also an opportunity for Banks and RZA to stretch out, free of the creative and personal demands that their "day jobs"—in Interpol and the Wu-Tang Clan, respectively—place on them.

"What RZA does is uniquely RZA," Banks contends. "Tracks like "Swordsman" on Liquid Swords—which is just the fucking gnarliest, meanest, atmospheric, dystopian thing, with clunking machinery and empty space, like a wasteland—that's RZA's genius and RZA's aesthetics. That's something I've often aspired to within Interpol, whereas it's something that comes completely naturally to RZA."

Benedict Evans

"I think over the course of making this record that we developed a certain kind of comfortable creative energy," RZA explains. "It was fun, too, which helped creatively. I don't know if I ever pissed Paul off, but he's never pissed me off. Especially in a collaborative thing, I think there's something really cool about that; that you can have a relationship with another musician that's balanced."

There's also an undeniable New York energy pulsing throughout Anything but Words, which both Banks and RZA argue comes from their New York roots and the common values they have as artists who came of age there.


"New York City accounts for the grit," Banks contends. "It's a tough city. You have to have a real thick skin to live here and stay here. It happened to relatives of mine, where they came here and gave it the fucking college try. But then it was like it drained their will to live. It's a lonely, cold city where you can feel really alone even though you're constantly surrounded by all these people. But if you can take that, I think you develop a survivalist mode."

"The cool thing about New York—from my experience of leaving New York and going to other places—is that it's got a fast pace that's very different from the pace of other cities," RZA says, picking up on Banks' thought. "I also think that growing up in New York City and coming up as artists here gave us an off-center quality that we both share, even though we come from different genres. We both like to experiment, we both like the adventure in art, and neither of us wants to stay the same. We both have that New York compulsion where we're both fine saying, 'Fuck it, and let's see what happens.'"


For now, with such a major artistic departure about to be released, RZA and Banks are clearly proud of the achievement, but even more eager to get their fans' feedback.

"We spent close to three years, off and on, in the studio, 10, 12, 14 hours a day," says RZA. "It took a long time, and you can hear that the money got spent. We did not rush it and pocket the money. So we've completed that part of our artistic expression, and now we want to go out and perform in front of the world, because this is music that I think deserves to be heard and will be a whole different kind of concert experience."

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