Is this still it? The Strokes keep it tight
REVIEW The Strokes The New Abnormal (Cult) ✩✩✩✩✩
Two decades on from shaking up rock music with their debut Is This It, The Strokes are in a peculiar position. The new wave/post-punk revival they sparked has long since come and gone. Now bands full of people who were toddlers at the time are doing it all over again. These bands are, collectively, less slavish to the same set of influences than the post-Strokes groups, demonstrating one of pop’s core truths, that a thing need not be original to seem fresh – as long as it has its own personality.
The Strokes themselves certainly did. They struck music like a comet, sent quakes across the US and Europe. Very few acts do this even once and you can count on your fingers those who have repeated it. That number does not include The Strokes, which leaves them with a problem – how to prevent everything else you do from sounding like an afterthought?
Their last LP, in 2013, felt that way. Comedown Machine seemed a suitable title for it. It was their most varied album to date but had a slapdash air, a sense of ‘try anything and see what sticks’. After a long break and a flurry of solo/side projects, the new one has real focus. It still darts around stylistically – New Order (a lot) here, David Bowie there – but wherever it lands, it grips, and it’s still self-evidently The Strokes throughout. It helps that the group retain their ability to write songs that wheedle their way into your head and stay there. The Strokes may no longer be making the weather but in The New Abnormal they’ve made a record that offers both substance and satisfaction.