Which Strokes albums are really worth it, and which are more experimental?
Ten seconds of “The Modern Age” through the telephone receiver. A record company boss didn’t need to hear anything more before signing the very young The Strokes – or so the legend would have it. And indeed: for three years, New Yorkers made us believe that guitar bands could still bring the stars out of the sky. Many summers would pass before a late flash.
On June 26, 2026, the quintet, which has remained unchanged to this day, will release its seventh studio album: REALITY AWAITS. It’s high time for a review.
MASTERPIECES
Is This It (2001)
A summer night on the Hudson River. After three to four calm lines of cocaine, twilight begins – a color between orange peels and saffron threads creeps up on the deep blue horizon. You look down at yourself: ripped jeans, dried blood, nothing dramatic. Time to leave. A Saab, built in 1982, is parked on the side of the road. Its body appears to be as damaged as the toe caps of the Converse Chucks on its feet. A sip of ice-cold Coca Cola. You turn the car key. On analog radio, Lou Reed, Tom Verlaine and Iggy Pop concentrate on the essentials. The hands seem tired, and yet they control the steering wheel effortlessly. Although there is nothing left to drive in today, the scenery seems perfect. Because you are young and beautiful and ready. And because the biggest of all existential questions are not asked in this world into which one was born.
IS THIS IT sets this feeling to music. With their debut album, the Strokes present themselves as confidently, fearlessly, as playfully detached as Rich Kids, who know how to take over their surroundings with the most casual gestures. “And whoever said rock is dead – we’re trying to revive it,” said drummer Fabrizio Moretti calmly at the time. He had good reasons. To this day, probably no indie album on earth has brought together such a torrent of hits: “Last Nite”, “Someday”, “Hard To Explain”, “Alone, Together”, “Barely Legal”. The spice of the successful recipe was its brevity – all songs were mixed with a maximum of eleven audio tracks. They lie close together, flattened, dozed off, locked in the garage rock room.
The scratchy, stuttering guitars of Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr. don’t need solo passages for their dry presence – small Peavey amplifiers are sufficient. Thanks to the studio compression of Julian Casablancas’ voice, his mumbled verses seem like voice messages from a cassette recorder, an echo of a future long past.
Six stars
Room On Fire (2003)
If you were to break this second party down to a slogan, it would share its motto with a campaign promise from Konrad Adenauer: No experiments. Nobody in the band – least of all Casablancas – wanted to risk shipwreck. Before bringing Gordon Raphael back into the wheelhouse, they hired Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich. The latter explained the failure of his venture with the words: “I wanted them to change something – and they didn’t.” Once again, the Strokes sound as if the confines of their rehearsal room had been squeezed through an overdriven telephone receiver. For the most part, this sound chamber dispenses with ornamentation: form follows function. function follows attitude.
The arrangement of the urban relationship neurosis “Reptilia” operates like a perfectly constructed engine – it generates maximum kinetic energy with minimal effort. Driving eighth-note movements produce acceleration without a stop sign. And the singer? He maneuvers his voice between cabin fever and hostility. However, the band does give their audience some innovation: the twin guitars of Valensi and Hammond Jr. rub against each other in a slightly more controlled but at the same time more complex manner and give each other more space between their runs. An example is “Automatic Stop”, a recognizable reggae vignette with an offbeat groove backrest. The first solo interludes can also be admired. One certainty remains: this nonchalance distilled from tousled heads and leather jackets is immune to bad songs.
Five stars
The New Abnormal (2020)
In the noughties, their garage walls contained a treasure trove – all you had to do was grab two albums. Later, the Strokes roamed synthetic research labs, but something was always missing. Just when hardly anyone could believe in a renaissance of their ornamentless jewels, midnight struck and a new decade began. During a New Year’s Eve concert, Julian Casablancas announced: “We have left the 2010s behind us. Now we have thawed again.” His entourage expected a masterpiece.
With Rick Rubin they had found a producer guru whose doctrine had accompanied the band through their early days: form follows function. His approaches were well known – cutting off useless decorations, chiseling away the essence. On “Bad Decisions” Casablancas once again sounds as if his half-asleep voice escapes the noise channel of a battered radio. In addition, Hammond Jr. and Valensi have sharpened their dueling guitars again; sometimes they sound like brass fanfares or Game Boy jingles. You definitely allow yourself a certain amount of exaltation: “Brooklyn Bridge To Chorus,” for example, begins as Italo-Disco-Fox. Three tracks later there is a languid retrofuturism, an art-pop stunner called “At The Door”, which completely dispenses with percussion. What holds this record together at its core is the casual yet relentless desire to be a hit. Some of the greatest rock pieces of the New Twenties.
Six stars
EXPERIMENTAL WORKS
First Impressions Of Earth (2005)
The Greek philosopher Heraclitus once mused that one could not step into the same river twice because the water of one moment would be gone the next moment. The situation is similar with indie bands: the first duplicate is still tolerated by critics – but on the condition that the third album’s direction be adjusted. The Strokes obeyed. Consequently, the New York City Musicians leave the Big Apple – meandering towards the starry tent. According to Julian Casablancas’ statements, the (confused-looking) record protagonist looks down on us earth children from objective space. Maybe that’s why everything seems less immediate: the mix sounds broader, cooler, darker, harder than before.
You also use test balloons. In “Ask Me Anything,” for example, in addition to the vocals, a cello-calibrated Mellotron echoes through the ballad vacuum. “Vision Of Division” immortalizes an art-rock fragmentation washed with whipping water, when the guitar solo runs into rabies. Across fourteen titles, a group of artists wrestles with Nietzsche’s imperative: “Become who you are.” A self-experiment worth listening to between expansion and rapture.
Four and a half stars
Comedown Machine (2013)
In terms of its variety, this record could have been released as a label compilation with eleven bands. Above all, “One Way Trigger” should be mentioned – for weeks the Grail Guardians of the Nullergarage raged about this, in their opinion, heretical falsetto song. Suddenly Julian Casablancas wanted to sound like Morten Harket. Sacrilege! The hopping synthesizer also unbalanced the cramped dancing legs of some purists. The disco funk on “Tap Out” even rocks through Michael Jackson’s moonwalker tracks with patent leather pumps. Then “Call It Fate, Call It Karma” shoots out of the sky: Casablancas mimes a pre-war chanteuse, his accompaniment a bar piano by Tom Waits.
Never before had the Strokes strayed so far from their Archimedean points as on these border crossings. They are breakneck acts, probably led by Nick Valensi. Praise be to the daring.
Four stars
Waste
Angles (2011)
Over the course of the six years of waiting, the Strokes frayed into five individual identities. Julian Casablancas’ solo paths led into New Wave realms, Fabrizio Moretti explored Brazilian Tropicália, Albert Hammond walked between multiple drug addictions and British indie rock music. And ANGLES? Sounds like an effort to bundle new genre threads between old garage walls into a light-handed overall ball. The former absolutist Casablancas explained to this magazine at the time that he “leaned back a little and ended up tying all the ideas together.” God, you miss it a bit, the emphasis of earlier days.
Instead, this album creates a fragmented kaleidoscope of pop. “Machu Picchu” and “Games” form synthesizer sounds made of glass, “Gratisfaction” seems to have emerged from the glam rock prisms of the seventies. A pleasing record – and at the same time the child of a time in which the Strokes have become epigones of themselves.
Three and a half stars