(Credits: Far Out / Roger Woolman)
Mon 1 September 2025 0:00, UK
“I just wanted to be one of The Strokes”, Alex Turner sings at the outset of one of the best songs, ‘Star Treatment’, from their very best album, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino.
And let’s be honest, who hasn’t felt that way before? Who wouldn’t have wanted to have been one of The Strokes? Who wouldn’t want to be in the coolest band of the century and have a real name like Julian Casablancas, Fabrizio Moretti or Nick Valensi? By the turn of the century, rock music was, for all intents and purposes, both creatively and spiritually dead.
It had become a slog to listen to the latest releases in guitar music over the last few decades, from the ridiculousness of bands like Kiss and Van Halen or Guns N’ Roses through to the heavy sludge and depressing droning of groups like Pearl Jam and Nirvana, the sleepy, boring pretension of bands like Radiohead and Muse or else in the stodgy drivel of Oasis, Blur and the rest of the Britpop bunch (not you, though, Pulp!).
Barely anyone was making anything fresh or exciting, anything that had that much to say or that had much artistic value or anything that really was even worth listening to any more. Not the Red Hot Chili Peppers, not Limp Bizkit and certainly not the Foo Fighters.
Long gone were the days of raw and pure invention from killer singers like Little Richard, Lloyd Price or Elvis Presley; long gone was the mercurial talent of anyone even close to Michael Bloomfield or the careless cool of a Keith Richards character. There were no new Link Wray’s coming up, no new Johnny Thunder’s or Sly Stone’s shaking up the scene. No one was reaching the heights of Marquee Moon in the 1990s, that’s for sure, but what’s worse is that it doesn’t even sound like many were reaching for those heights, either. This is not to write off the astonishing or groundbreaking music being written and released by someone like Fiona Apple or even Wilco and other groups like them, or the established greats like Dylan and Waits who put out monumental albums towards the end of the decade, but in terms of out and out rock and roll from new and exciting talent, the party was over.
Until it wasn’t. The Strokes arrived on the scene and sent a jolt of electricity through the corpse of rock and roll, shocking it back to life and creating a thousand Frankensteins in the form of groups like the Arctic Monkeys, Franz Ferdinand, The Libertines, Kings of Leon, The Killers, The Kooks and countless other indie artists in the process.
When you think of the year 2001, The Strokes admittedly might not be the very first thing that you think of, but they certainly soundtracked not only the year itself, but through their impact and their inspiration, the next few years to come as well.
The new century brought with it a revitalised energy of abandon, of recklessness or carelessness and a sense of freedom amongst the younger cohort of the population and each of those moods and feelings were both played out across and, ultimately, exacerbated by the wild music on Is This It? In fact, the album captures the feeling of being young, of being carefree and of having the whole world, the whole century and indeed the whole of the rest of your life ahead of you that to even hear the opening crashes and stabs of guitar in songs like ‘Soma’ or ‘Someday’ can instantly transport you back in time to 2001 when you really were young, carefree and looking forward to whatever life had in store for you.
In fact, every song on the album has that transportational quality, but perhaps none more so than ‘Last Nite’, the anthem of the young, the careless or the care-free. This song was to the young people of 2001 what ‘That’s All Right’ was to the young people of 1956, or what ‘Born to Run’ was to kids in 1975. It’s the sound of freedom, and of being granted that freedom for the first time. It’s the sound of realising that you’re alive and that you can do anything that you want to do. It’s the sound of being in a dark bar with a bottle in your hand and your best buddies all around you, or of being out on the road driving a little bit faster than you’re supposed to be, wind in your hair and a whole bunch of butterflies in your stomach. It’s the sound of the promise of the best night of your life, every night of your life, being ahead of you, no matter what happened to you last night.
Everybody knows how this one goes, everybody knows all of these words and how to sing them and how to slur them, and everyone can sing along with this guitar solo too, even if they’ve never heard the song before. And, once they’ve listened to this song and gotten inside it, everyone can know what it sounded like to be in 2001, as well, at the start of the great rock revival, when the whole world was ahead of us and anything was possible right before it all came crashing back down again at the start of ‘The Modern Age.’
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