The first time the Strokes put out an album in the midst of a local and national crisis was on October 9, 2001. The U.S. release of their full-length début, “Is This It,” had been delayed by 9/11, and the band had scrambled to excise “New York City Cops,” a sneering indictment of the city’s police force, from the CD. (It remained on the vinyl.) New York was grieving and dazed, but the Strokes seemed so emblematic of the city’s excesses and allure that loving them felt nearly patriotic.
When “Is This It” was released, I was twenty-one, and in my first semester of an M.F.A. program. I worked as an editorial intern at Spin a couple of days a week, and spent most of my evenings drinking cheap beer and going to see bands at the Mercury Lounge, a small rock club on the Lower East Side. I wore threadbare vintage T-shirts and artfully disintegrating Chuck Taylors, and never went anywhere without a Manhattan Portage messenger bag and an enormous pair of headphones. I was young, broke, privileged, and oblivious; I believed that New York was the exact center of the universe. As such, I was almost too perfectly positioned to receive the Strokes as a kind of nihilist gospel. I worshipped the band instantly and thoroughly.
Musically, the Strokes weren’t doing anything particularly innovative, and critics of the band excitedly pointed out how easy it was to find precedents for its anxious, hooky indie rock: the Velvet Underground, Television, the Stooges. But it had been a while since rock and roll had sounded so rangy and bored. In the late nineties, the genre had grown angry and hypermasculine. Bands such as Staind, Creed, and System of a Down, all of which had No. 1 records in 2001, were led by red-faced men who sang with almost unfathomable conviction. Julian Casablancas, the Strokes’ handsome and vaguely bummed-out lead singer, was listless by comparison. He drank too much—sometimes he leaned on the microphone stand to steady himself—and his eyes were soft and doleful. “When we was young, oh man, did we have fun,” Casablancas sang, on “Someday.” Even at twenty-two, he was already over it.
Now, eighteen years later, as the city again attempts to steady itself, the Strokes have released “The New Abnormal,” the band’s sixth album and its first since 2013. The title is eerily prescient—a handy summation of how daily life in New York has changed since the start of the year. This is a lonesome and frightening time, and nostalgia is a heavy and intoxicating force. “The New Abnormal” sounds better to me than almost anything else I’ve listened to this spring. The album was produced by Rick Rubin, whose method consists mostly of stripping songs of extraneous or maudlin elements, compressing the audio, and pumping up the volume. Rubin can turn an ordinary song into a bullet. His practice of reduction and amplification doesn’t work for every artist, but this distillation has made the Strokes sound only sharper and more potent. (The band was never really beloved for its subtlety.)
The Strokes first played “Bad Decisions,” an early single from the album, in February, at a rally for Bernie Sanders in Durham, New Hampshire. (Many popular indie-rock acts, including Bon Iver and Vampire Weekend, have performed at events in support of the Sanders campaign; one of the great pre-pandemic joys was watching Sanders carefully consult his notes before yelling an artist’s name.) “Bad Decisions” has all the elements of a classic Strokes single, including an overly familiar chorus. (“Last Nite,” from “Is This It,” featured a riff based on Tom Petty’s “American Girl”; “Bad Decisions” resembles Billy Idol’s “Dancing with Myself” enough that Idol and his writing partner, Tony James, were preëmptively given a songwriting credit.) “I’m making bad decisions/Really, really bad decisions,” Casablancas sings, in the song’s final chorus. Then he drags out a “Yeeeaaahhh!” in a way that sounds equal parts celebratory and despairing. He seems to understand that the effects of poor judgment can be both banal and devastating, and that our worst behavior is often deliberate and premeditated. Sometimes we know that we’re doing something stupid, but we do it anyway. Acknowledging the paradox helps to neutralize the shame.
The Strokes’ music makes everything feel less high-stakes. This might be why it sounds so good in an emergency. Nothing is ever so unbearable that it can’t be shrugged off. People arrive and depart, relationships begin and fracture, things are lost, parties get boring—whatever. Casablancas’s songs briefly make a person feel like she’s just a little bit above it all, worn out in a sexy, oblique way, rather than in the usual gutted, ugly way. “The room is on fire as she’s fixing her hair,” Casablancas sang, on “Reptilia,” a track from “Room on Fire,” the follow-up to “Is This It.”
Casablancas is forty-one now, a husband and a father, but he remains repulsed by melodrama and displays of sentimentality. Instead, he is a stealthily emotive singer—he often ends notes with a delicate little flourish, letting his voice become full and pretty, if only for a moment. He does this to incredible effect in “At the Door,” a tense, spare song about cycles of self-flagellation. Its verses feature only Casablancas’s voice and a synthesizer. He sings of blankly accepting whatever he’s got coming:
I can’t escape it
Never gonna make it
Out of this in time
I guess that’s just fine.
For much of the twenty-tens, it seemed as if the Strokes might be done making records altogether. In interviews, the band members were often cagey about their interpersonal dynamics, though it was still widely understood that on their first three releases (“Room on Fire” was followed by “First Impressions of Earth,” in 2006) Casablancas functioned as a sort of default creative director, writing all the lyrics and most of the music. When Casablancas’s bandmates (the guitarists Albert Hammond, Jr., and Nick Valensi, the bassist Nikolai Fraiture, and the drummer Fabrizio Moretti) suggested that Casablancas consider a more collaborative approach to the work, he complied—but one got the sense that he did so with deep bitterness. The recording of “Angles,” the band’s fourth record, was fraught. Casablancas was supposedly absent for most of the sessions, recording his parts alone. “It was awful—just awful,” Valensi later told Pitchfork. The band chose not to tour or to do any interviews or appearances to promote its next release, the jittery and unfocussed “Comedown Machine,” from 2013.
Meanwhile, Casablancas quit drinking, moved upstate, and started a new band, the Voidz. He began writing different sorts of songs. “Human Sadness,” a meandering, eleven-minute freak-out from the Voidz’s album “Tyranny,” seemed to speak to some long-simmering avant-garde aspirations. (Casablancas’s vocals are mostly incomprehensible, and a scratchy guitar solo lasts a full minute.) If “Is This It” is analogous to the Velvet Underground’s “Loaded,” then “Tyranny” is Casablancas’s “Metal Machine Music”—weird, gorgeously antagonistic, and expressly noncommercial.
It’s interesting to wonder if the Strokes will appeal to listeners born in the years following “Is This It”—young people who are in thrall, perhaps, to some of what the Strokes inspired (the Arctic Monkeys, Ty Segall) but not necessarily to the band itself. “I’m not scared/Just don’t care/I’m not listening, you hear?” Casablancas sings, on “Selfless.” The sensation he’s describing—a kind of purposeful disengagement—is familiar to anyone who came of age in the nineties, but apathy of this sort is largely anathema to Generation Z. Will the idea that life is too mortifying to be taken seriously compute for teen-agers who spend their spare time screaming themselves hoarse at climate protests? They have fought to hone and perpetuate a grammar of inclusivity, in which no one is made to feel insufficient, but so much of the pleasure of listening to the Strokes is in feeling as if you have arrived someplace exclusive, where heartache doesn’t quite register.
Yet Casablancas is not apolitical; he has spoken often and at length about his own distrust of capitalist systems, despite being a product of them. (His father is John Casablancas, the founder of Elite Model Management; his mother is a former Miss Denmark; and he grew up attending various boarding and private schools.) In a 2018 appearance on “The Late Late Show with James Corden,” Casablancas wore a militaristic black cargo vest. As Corden gamely attempted to stuff its pockets with orange slices, Casablancas issued a warning: “We’re in an invisible war, my friend. Gotta be ready.” Perhaps there is an emotional tipping point where caring too much begins to look like not caring at all. The Strokes might know it better than any other band.♦
