The Strokes Finally Act Their Age

The New Abnormal delivers something unexpected: a depth of feeling.

The Strokes have a knack for stumbling onto the edge of the zeitgeist. Long before the world sheltered in place, they decided to name their sixth album The New Abnormal, a title that is strangely in tune with the early months of 2020, when nobody is quite sure what lies on the other side of the COVID-19 pandemic. It's a situation that offers a near-rhyme with an incident surrounding the release of their debut Is This It nearly two decades ago. The album appeared in the UK in the summer of 2001—standardized global release dates were a fantasy back then, plus the Strokes helped build their reputation through the now vanished British music newsweeklies—but by the time it hit American shores it was shorn of "New York City Cops," the spiky rocker excised out of respect for the first responders lost during the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Earlier this year, the Strokes played "New York City Cops" as part of a rally for Bernie Sanders and nobody batted an eye. Chalk this up to the passage of time: save for the anorak set, nobody remembers that the song stirred up controversy in the days after 9/11 plus it's never a bad move to bad mouth police at a leftist gathering. It also still sounded potent, with its sneered chorus retaining its anti-authoritarian punch years later, even as the group drifts toward middle age. The band's very appearance at a Bernie rally signaled that the five members of the Strokes were beginning to look outside of themselves, a significant shift for a group pigeonholed as narcissistic wealthy scenesters from the start.

That criticism stuck because it was grounded in reality. As the lead singer and the scion of a fashion magnate, Julian Casablancas received the brunt of the attacks, but Albert Hammond Jr was the son of a '70s soft-rock crooner (he had a smash with "It Never Rains In Southern California" and co-wrote "To All The Girls I've Loved Before"), and the pair met the other Strokes—Nick Valensi, Fabrizio Moretti and Nikolai Fraiture—in toney New York schools. All this personal privilege melded into a unified front by the time of Is This It. A writer at the time said they were the first band since the Ramones to be identified by their shared identity, not their individual persona. This bond stayed strong through Room On Fire, the 2003 sequel to Is This It, but the album also sowed the seeds of discord as its commercial underperformance proved that they would never dominate the charts in a fashion commiserate with their critical reputation.

The Strokes began to drift away from each other after Room On Fire, with each member pursuing their own solo projects, yet they never took a hiatus, they never called it quits. They persevered where their peers did not. The White Stripes called it a day in 2011, Interpol shed members, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs faded away, but the Strokes rolled on, taking their time between albums but never relinquishing their headlining status at festivals. Still, those busman holidays added up, suggesting that the quintet would rather be anywhere else but sharing a stage with the other guys who gave them a career. 

In a recent interview with Mikael Wood at the Los Angeles Times, Casablancas scoffed at the notion that the Strokes couldn't stand each other, asking "I wonder which chords are making people think that" they're at odds. The New Abnormal offers supporting evidence for his thesis as it is their sleekest and strongest since their debut but the albums separating it and Room On Fire do suggest that the Strokes struggled to find secure footing after the heady days of Y2K. First Impressions Of Earth contained too many ideas to cohere—it's a record for the heads, containing brilliant peaks and tantalizing detours— the neon-colored Angles reigned in the excess and Comedown Machine seemed like the work of dogged lifers: seamless and slightly colorless, a record to help a band get through another year or two on the road.

Maybe these three records suggest an aimless band but they also helped build a career for the Strokes. Sure, hits were hard to come by but, let's face it, they were always hard to come by for this group. "Juicebox" became their only Hot 100 hit in 2005, and that's the last time they cracked the UK Top 10 but they were still pulling in crowds on the festival circuit, and at a certain point the records and the years piled up, leaving these muddled LPs as the core of the band's career. Is This It provided the aesthetic and the foundation of a songbook, but the barbed rock of Room On Fire and new wave obsessions of Angles were key to the band's essential identity.

The New Abnormal underscores this point even when it rhymes with the band's beginnings. "The Adults Are Talking" kicks off the album with a slinky rhythm and riff that turns "Is This It" inside out, and the Billy Idol flair of "Bad Decisions" echoes how "Last Night" reworked Tom Petty's "American Girl." Underneath these flourishes, the album is decidedly calmer, the work of a group crawling toward middle age. The maturity comes as a shock, as they've never shaken the image of being jaded young punks, nor have they quite surmounted the idea that they kept reworking their original ideas. It didn't help that some bands that followed in their footsteps revealed some of the self-imposed limitations of the Strokes. Take Arctic Monkeys. For as parochial as Arctic Monkeys are, there's little question that the Strokes were a primary inspiration for Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not but Alex Turner flaunted a verbal acumen that underscored how Casablancas specialized in cryptic ennui. 

Casablancas still sounds weary on The New Abnormal but being way too tired suits a singer who is now in his early forties. The rest of the band follows suit, playing with restraint but not resignation, opting for textured moodiness whenever the opportunity arises. Despite the nods to their past, this is no back to basics move for the Strokes. The album teems with synths and new wave melodies, the rhythms are generally slower than expected and they consciously avoid anything resembling seediness. They're not renouncing rock & roll but they're not the young men who made Is This It, a group whose definition of music was tied to their favorite albums. The Strokes are veterans who've integrated their influences, happy to take the time to have "At the Door" spill out over a guitarless and rhythmless five minutes, and they're not much for cranking up the amplifiers and goosing the grooves, either. They lay heavy in their own skin, gaining strength from the flexible rhythms of Fraiture and Moretti, then gliding by on the intricate interplay of Valensi and Hammond Jr, a pair of guitarists who combine to create one singular riff. As densely comfortable as this interplay is, it's Casablancas that provides the emotional touchstone for the album. His words can still veer toward the inscrutable but there's a clarity in his writing that finds its match on his reliance on a keening falsetto. That high lonesome sound provides a window to the rest of the record, where he's struggling with issues endemic to anybody in their forties: dashed hopes, diminished expectations and heartache, floating melancholy that ties together the entire album.

The Strokes often seemed determined to run away from any semblance of feeling, so it's striking that they've delivered an album where confused, sometimes inarticulate emotions are pushed to the forefront. The New Abnormal feels different from the rest of the band's catalog, a record filled with internal conflict and external cohesion. All the years of tension and listlessness help pull The New Abnormal into perspective, making its emotional resonance feel earned.