Downward Strokes: Was That It?
“I JUST wanted to be one of The Strokes,” sang Alex Turner on Arctic Monkeys’ 2018 album Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino. It appeared, however, that The Strokes didn’t want to be in The Strokes. They didn’t promote their last album, Comedown Machine in 2013, “because we weren’t in harmony,” the band’s lead singer Julian Casablancas told The Guardian last month.
“There was conflict and there was fear and we got through it and we made records, but it wasn’t, you know, out of pure brotherly love and musical inspiration.”
Guitarist Albert Hammond Jr said in the summer of 2017 that the band was working on new material with Rick Rubin, who, in 2007, Time magazine put on their list of 100 Most Influential People in the World. Hammond quickly put out a correction: “We met and played a few music ideas for Rick to feel out a vibe but even a theoretical album plan would be years away, if at all.”
He followed this up with: “Sorry everyone, we are not in the studio recording.”
The New Abnormal, the new release by The Strokes, does indeed come produced by Rick Rubin, not that it seems to matter. Their first LP since Comedown Machine, this has been touted as possibly the New York band’s last chance to halt their terminal decline.
The Strokes’ debut Is This It in 2001 had them heralded as the best new band on terra firma. In 2003, the band’s second album, Room on Fire, kind of kept the momentum going. The intervening years haven’t been too kind.
The New Abnormal is a very good album, but it could never be as good as Is This It. It has some crackers on it, among them Bad Decisions, which sounds like Talking Heads fronted by Billy Idol singing Dancing With Myself (Idol and his former Generation X bandmate Tony James get a songwriting credit, unsurprisingly); Why Are Sundays So Depressing, which has echoes of, believe or not, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers; and Eternal Summer which owes a debt to Love My Way by the Psychedelic Furs. (Not so bizarrely, then, the Psychedelic Furs’ Richard and Tim Butler are credited as songwriters on Eternal Summer.) Still, that says a lot, doesn’t it?
“Not trying to build no dynasty,” Casablancas sings on At the Door; and on Ode To The Mets: “I was just bored, playing the guitar.”
The first Strokes album in seven years has Casablancas asking “And the Eighties bands, where did they go?” on Brooklyn Bridge to Chorus. You could just as easily ask, where did The Strokes go?
Maybe Casablancas — who was once called the standard-bearer for Lower East Side ennui — has more jaded ennui than anything else these days. Who knows?
In 2018, at a time he was promoting Virtue (the political second album of his other band solo Voidz), New York magazine asked him, is being in The Strokes at all inspiring?
“That’s not where my focus is,” he replied. “To me, The Strokes… I was thinking about it earlier today… I may have been fooling myself but back in the beginning it was good and I was loving what we were doing.”