70 THENEWYORKER,APRIL20, 2020
POP MUSIC
CRISIS ROCK
The Strokes demonstrate their knack for good music in bad times.BYAMANDA PETRUSICHTHE CRITICS
T
he first time the Strokes put
out an album in the midst of
a local and national crisis was
on October 9, 2001. The U.S. release
of their full-length début, “Is This It,”
had been delayed by 9/11, and the band
had scrambled to excise “New York
City Cops,” a sneering indictment of
the city’s police force, from the CD. (It
remained on the vinyl.) New York was
grieving and dazed, but the Strokes
seemed so emblematic of the city’s ex-
cesses and allure that loving them felt
nearly patriotic.
When “Is This It” was released, I
was twenty-one, and in my first semes-
ter of an M.F.A. program. I worked as
an editorial intern at Spin a couple of
days a week, and spent most of my eve-
nings drinking cheap beer and going
to see bands at the Mercury Lounge,
a small rock club on the Lower East
Side. I wore threadbare vintage T-shirts
and artfully disintegrating Chuck Tay-
lors, and never went anywhere without
a Manhattan Portage messenger bag
and an enormous pair of headphones.
I was young, broke, privileged, and
oblivious; I believed that New York
was the exact center of the universe. As
such, I was almost too perfectly posi-
tioned to receive the Strokes as a kind
of nihilist gospel. I worshipped the band
instantly and thoroughly.
Musically, the Strokes weren’t doing
anything particularly innovative, and
critics of the band excitedly pointed
out how easy it was to find precedents
for its anxious, hooky indie rock: the
Velvet Underground, Television, the
Stooges. But it had been a while since
rock and roll had sounded so rangy
and bored. In the late nineties, the
genre had grown angry and hyper-
masculine. Bands such as Staind, Creed,
and System of a Down, all of which
had No. 1 records in 2001, were led by
red-faced men who sang with almost
unfathomable conviction. Julian Casa-
blancas, the Strokes’ handsome and
vaguely bummed-out lead singer, was
listless by comparison. He drank too
much—sometimes he leaned on the
microphone stand to steady himself—
and his eyes were soft and doleful.
“When we was young, oh man, did
we have fun,” Casablancas sang, on
“Someday.” Even at twenty-two, he
was already over it.
Now, eighteen years later, as the city
again attempts to steady itself, the
Strokes have released “The New Ab-
normal,” the band’s sixth album and its
first since 2013. The title is eerily pre-
scient—a handy summation of how
daily life in New York has changed since
the start of the year. This is a lonesome
and frightening time, and nostalgia is
a heavy and intoxicating force. “The
New Abnormal” sounds better to me
than almost anything else I’ve listened
to this spring. The album was produced
by Rick Rubin, whose method consists
mostly of stripping songs of extrane-
ous or maudlin elements, compressing
the audio, and pumping up the volume.
Rubin can turn an ordinary song into
a bullet. His practice of reduction and
amplification doesn’t work for every
artist, but this distillation has made the
Strokes sound only sharper and more
potent. (The band was never really be-
loved for its subtlety.)
The Strokes first played “Bad De-cisions,” an early single from the al-
bum, in February, at a rally for Bernie
Sanders in Durham, New Hampshire.
(Many popular indie-rock acts, includ-
ing Bon Iver and Vampire Weekend,
have performed at events in support of
the Sanders campaign; one of the great
pre-pandemic joys was watching San-
ders carefully consult his notes before
yelling an artist’s name.) “Bad Deci-
sions” has all the elements of a classic
Strokes single, including an overly fa-
miliar chorus. (“Last Nite,” from “Is
This It,” featured a riff based on Tom
Petty’s “American Girl”; “Bad Deci-
sions” resembles Billy Idol’s “Dancing
with Myself ” enough that Idol and
his writing partner, Tony James, were
preëmptively given a songwriting
credit.) “I’m making bad decisions/Re-
ally, really bad decisions,” Casablancas
sings, in the song’s final chorus. Then
he drags out a “Yeeeaaahhh!” in a way
that sounds equal parts celebratory and
despairing. He seems to understand
that the effects of poor judgment can
be both banal and devastating, and that
our worst behavior is often deliberate
and premeditated. Sometimes we know
that we’re doing something stupid, but
we do it anyway. Acknowledging the
paradox helps to neutralize the shame.
The Strokes’ music makes every-
thing feel less high-stakes. This might
be why it sounds so good in an emer-
gency. Nothing is ever so unbearable
that it can’t be shrugged off. People ar-
rive and depart, relationships begin and
fracture, things are lost, parties get bor-
ing—whatever. Casablancas’s songs
briefly make a person feel like she’s just
a little bit above it all, worn out in a ABOVE: SERGE BLOCH