72 THE NEWYORKER, APRIL 20, 2020
different sorts of songs. “Human Sad-
ness,” a meandering, eleven-minute
freak-out from the Voidz’s album “Tyr-
anny,” seemed to speak to some long-
simmering avant-garde aspirations.
(Casablancas’s vocals are mostly in-
comprehensible, and a scratchy guitar
solo lasts a full minute.) If “Is This It” is
analogous to the Velvet Underground’s
“Loaded,” then “Tyranny” is Casablan-
cas’s “Metal Machine Music”—weird,
gorgeously antagonistic, and expressly
noncommercial.
It’s interesting to wonder if the
Strokes will appeal to listeners born in
the years following “Is This It”—young
people who are in thrall, perhaps, to
some of what the Strokes inspired (the
Arctic Monkeys, Ty Segall) but not
necessarily to the band itself. “I’m not
scared / Just don’t care / I’m not listen-
ing, you hear?” Casablancas sings, on
“Selfless.” The sensation he’s describ-
ing—a kind of purposeful disengage-
ment—is familiar to anyone who came
of age in the nineties, but apathy of
this sort is largely anathema to Gen-
eration Z. Will the idea that life is too
mortifying to be taken seriously com-
pute for teen-agers who spend their
spare time screaming themselves hoarse
at climate protests? They have fought
to hone and perpetuate a grammar of
inclusivity, in which no one is made to
feel insufficient, but so much of the
pleasure of listening to the Strokes is
in feeling as if you have arrived some-
place exclusive, where heartache doesn’t
quite register.
Yet Casablancas is not apolitical; he
has spoken often and at length about his
own distrust of capitalist systems, de-
spite being a product of them. (His fa-
ther is John Casablancas, the founder of
Elite Model Management; his mother
is a former Miss Denmark; and he grew
up attending various boarding and pri-
vate schools.) In a 2018 appearance
on “The Late Late Show with James
Corden,” Casablancas wore a militaristic
black cargo vest. As Corden gamely at-
tempted to stuff its pockets with orange
slices, Casablancas issued a warning:
“We’re in an invisible war, my friend.
Gotta be ready.” Perhaps there is an
emotional tipping point where caring
too much begins to look like not car-
ing at all. The Strokes might know it
better than any other band.
sexy, oblique way, rather than in the
usual gutted, ugly way. “The room is
on fire as she’s fixing her hair,” Casa-
blancas sang, on “Reptilia,” a track from
“Room on Fire,” the follow-up to “Is
This It.”
Casablancas is forty-one now, a hus-
band and a father, but he remains re-
pulsed by melodrama and displays of
sentimentality. Instead, he is a stealth-
ily emotive singer—he often ends notes
with a delicate little flourish, letting
his voice become full and pretty, if only
for a moment. He does this to incred-
ible effect in “At the Door,” a tense,
spare song about cycles of self-flagel-
lation. Its verses feature only Casa-
blancas’s voice and a synthesizer. He
sings of blankly accepting whatever
he’s got coming:
I can’t escape it
Never gonna make it
Out of this in time
I guess that’s just fine.
F
or much of the twenty-tens, it
seemed as if the Strokes might be
done making records altogether. In in-
terviews, the band members were often
cagey about their interpersonal dynam-
ics, though it was still widely under-
stood that on their first three releases
(“Room on Fire” was followed by “First
Impressions of Earth,” in 2006) Casa-
blancas functioned as a sort of default
creative director, writing all the lyrics
and most of the music. When Casa-
blancas’s bandmates (the guitarists Al-
bert Hammond, Jr., and Nick Valensi,
the bassist Nikolai Fraiture, and the
drummer Fabrizio Moretti) suggested
that Casablancas consider a more col-
laborative approach to the work, he
complied—but one got the sense that
he did so with deep bitterness. The re-
cording of “Angles,” the band’s fourth
record, was fraught. Casablancas was
supposedly absent for most of the ses-
sions, recording his parts alone. “It was
awful—just awful,” Valensi later told
Pitchfork. The band chose not to tour
or to do any interviews or appearances
to promote its next release, the jittery
and unfocussed “Comedown Machine,”
from 2013.
Meanwhile, Casablancas quit drink-
ing, moved upstate, and started a new
band, the Voidz. He began writing
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