(Credits: Far Out / Spotify)
Sat 24 January 2026 19:35, UK
When the millennium turned, and all culture critics thought music was going to move further into a landscape of ultra-futurised pop, The Strokes came out with their debut album Is This It and turned everything on its head.
Rather than innovate rock and take it into a glossy new landscape, The Strokes looked backwards, to the lo-fi garage aesthetics that the genre was built upon. Simple chord progressions and distorted vocals were the backbone of the record that, against all odds, captured the hopeless enthusiasm of the cultural youth in 2001.
Casablancas’ voice was the figurehead of that. While the twinned guitar attack of Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr painted an appropriately frantic picture for his performances to live, it was the elusive and somewhat apathetic delivery of Casablancas that made this record such a counterculture favourite. Modernity and false promise were made to look stupid, in the frankly unbothered voice of our leader, Casablancas.
“People that weren’t interested in rock ’n’ roll,” the album’s producer Gordon Raphael remembered, and with electronic music supposedly acting as a saviour, the band recaptured the vitality of rock and roll within the cultural lexicon. He continued, explaining that they weren’t just disinterested, they “hated it, because it was their parents’ music, got into it. There were people that told me, ‘We love techno. But as soon as we heard The Strokes, I got a leather jacket and a guitar, and now I have a band’.”
It was a responsibility that weighed heavily on the band, though, as their follow-up album in 2003, Room On Fire, was an exciting sophomore record that largely rehashed the formula of Is This It, to a slightly lesser degree and ultimately marked a spiral into creative conflict.
Rampant drug abuse and a continued expectation to deliver the very next Is This It, debilitated the band and resulted in relatively underwhelming records. 2011’s Angles certainly wasn’t the antidote to that, but it did showcase one song that captured the collaborative spirit of the band once again. As Valensi remembered, lead single ‘Under Cover of Darkness’ “was a song where literally all of us contributed to the writing. It made me think, ‘Wow, maybe we’ll do our best work when we put all our ideas together’”.
It had the same frenetic energy that made the band so compelling in 2001, repackaged to fit the context of angular indie in 2011, but while Valensi remarked that it represented somewhat of a new chapter for The Strokes, Casablancas was left unconvinced by this new direction and felt as though it veered too closely into the territory of commercialism.
He explained, “I guess it’s about someone who works in the military and has a girlfriend. It’s cheesy, I guess, but it’s about having to leave a loved one behind. I weirdly like the bridge and the chorus of that Clarence Clemons song [‘You’re A Friend of Mine’]. So that was the vibe we were going for,” before sheepishly adding, “I shouldn’t confess to these things!”
It was the sound of the band scratching at the greatness that shot them to stardom in 2001, but they failed to truly achieve it. The ten years between those records saw a slow decline in livelihoods, relationships and creativity, and ultimately they had to reckon with the fact, they would never be that band again.
Related Topics