Certain cities produce music the way alleyways produce rumors. New York has always excelled at it. One decade, the noise spills out of CBGB, another from the Bronx, another from mirrored dance floors. By the end of the 1990s, the city had grown sleek and expensive, yet the clubs still smelled faintly of beer and amplifier dust. Rock bands kept appearing, but none seemed capable of capturing the moment. Then five well-connected downtown kids arrived with guitars that sounded like they had been dragged through a puddle and dried under a streetlamp.
Their timing was excellent. The year before, Radiohead had released the chilly, digital masterpiece Kid A, a record so influential that critics began speaking openly about the death of guitar rock. The future, it seemed, would hum through laptops and samplers. Rock bands with amps and distortion pedals were beginning to look like antiques. Which made what happened next feel almost rude.
Those five were singer Julian Casablancas, guitarists Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr., bassist Nikolai Fraiture, and drummer Fabrizio Moretti. Casablancas, Valensi, and Moretti met as teenagers at the Lycée Français in Manhattan. Fraiture joined through neighborhood friendships, the kind formed wandering city blocks after school. Hammond arrived a little later after meeting Casablancas at a Swiss boarding school and relocating to New York to complete the lineup.
By the time the band began rehearsing seriously around 1998, they had already spent years orbiting the same classrooms, apartments, and late-night hangouts. That familiarity gave their music a particular ease. The Strokes did not sound like five musicians discovering each other. They sounded like five friends who already knew exactly how the night tended to end.
“And now my fears, they come to me in threes.”
When Is This It appeared in 2001, the buzz surrounding the band had been fermenting for months. Their early EP and downtown shows turned them into a rumor passed between clubgoers and record scouts. The cultural backdrop helped. Fashion and nightlife were drifting toward a look that would later be labeled indie sleaze: skinny jeans, smeared eyeliner, cigarettes glowing in half-lit bars, the suggestion that the night might continue somewhere less respectable. Casablancas’s father ran one of the world’s most famous modeling agencies, and that orbit of models, photographers, and after-parties inevitably bled into the band’s image. The Strokes looked like a rock band that had wandered out of a fashion shoot and into a rehearsal room, carrying themselves with the casual confidence of people who knew the bartender and probably the bartender’s roommate, too.
The sound itself pulled from several corners of New York’s musical past. The cool minimalism of The Velvet Underground provided a blueprint for restraint, while the interlocking guitar lines of Television offered a model for how two guitars could weave together without clogging the air. Casablancas even spoke about admiring the rhythmic phrasing of Ms. Lauryn Hill, an influence that might seem distant until you hear the relaxed swing in his delivery. Beyond Gotham, there were flashes of pop craftsmanship borrowed from Tom Petty and the street-level velocity of Ramones. The Strokes sounded scruffy, but the ingredients were chosen carefully, like a cocktail that looks casual until you realize the bartender knows exactly what she is doing.
The songs move with quick confidence, like a band eager to finish the drink and head somewhere louder. The title track, “Is This It,” opens the album with a sleepy groove and a voice that sounds like it has already been awake too long. Casablancas wonders if the moment everyone promised might already be slipping away. “The Modern Age” jolts the record into motion with sharp guitar stabs and a rhythm section that moves like a subway train catching speed. “Soma” drifts in afterward, woozy and slightly surreal, its chorus floating like smoke toward the ceiling. In three songs, the band sketches the emotional territory of the album: boredom, curiosity, and the faint suspicion that youth might be evaporating even as the party keeps refilling the glasses.
The middle stretch contains the songs that turned the Strokes into radio fixtures. “Someday” rides a breezy guitar line while Casablancas sings about nostalgia before he has fully earned it, a trick that lands as both ironic and sincere. “Last Nite” follows with one of the great riffs of the early 2000s, a melody so buoyant it practically leans out the passenger window. “Hard to Explain” might be the album’s emotional center, its nervous rhythm capturing the sensation of running faster than your own explanations. Listening now, the songs still feel rumpled and alive, like a night where someone mutters that the night’s not over, someone lights another cigarette, and nobody seems particularly interested in going home.
The album arrived just before a moment that changed the way the city moved. After the September 11 attacks, New York entered a strange stretch where grief and defiance shared the same sidewalk. In that environment, the Strokes’ music became oddly omnipresent. Their songs spilled from bars, car stereos, and downtown apartments, soundtracking a wave of nights where people who had supposedly matured beyond reckless behavior suddenly returned to it with renewed enthusiasm. There was something comforting about the band’s looseness. The music suggested that life could still be messy, impulsive, occasionally dishonest. A city that had been reminded of its fragility was eager to believe that the room was still on fire somewhere, even if someone was calmly fixing their hair.
Around the same moment, a cluster of bands emerged from the same ecosystem of rehearsal rooms and grimy clubs. Interpol delivered icy post-punk precision. Yeah Yeah Yeahs arrived with art-damaged swagger. TV on the Radio fused electronics, soul, and noise into something thrillingly strange. A few states over, The White Stripes were stripping the form down to red, white, and raw nerve, proving that two people and a half-broken amplifier could still start a small fire. Across the Atlantic, Arctic Monkeys would soon channel a similar guitar urgency into their own local mythology. A little later, LCD Soundsystem translated downtown cool into dance-floor philosophy. Together they suggested a cultural reset. The guitars were not dead after all. They had simply been waiting for someone to plug them back in.
Part of the charm of Is This It lies in its deliberately rough surface. Producer Gordon Raphael captured many tracks in first or second takes, preserving the looseness of a band that sounded like it had wandered straight from rehearsal into the studio. Yet the apparent scruffiness masked a different truth. The Strokes were obsessively rehearsed, drilling the songs until their timing locked together with surgical precision. Casablancas famously ran his vocals through a cheap distortion unit to give them the texture of a battered transistor radio. The trick worked beautifully. The record feels casual and slightly disreputable, yet every beat lands exactly where it should, like someone pretending not to care while quietly checking the clock.
That illusion rippled outward through the next generation of musicians. Bands like Geese absorbed the lesson that chaos and melody could coexist comfortably. The Killers borrowed elements of the Strokes’ sharp guitar economy while aiming for stadium-sized choruses. Vampire Weekend refined the downtown aesthetic into something brighter and more collegiate. Even pop artists like Billie Eilish have pointed to the band’s atmosphere and attitude as part of the cultural oxygen they grew up breathing. The Strokes were not the only band shaping the moment, but their debut became one of the clearest blueprints.
The album artwork fits the mood perfectly. The original international cover featured a stark black-and-white photograph of a gloved hand resting against a bare hip, an image that suggested both intimacy and provocation. For American release, it was replaced with a swirling photograph of particle collisions, a cosmic abstraction that looked like something discovered under a microscope. Both images share the same spirit: minimalist, suggestive, a little dangerous, like a photograph taken seconds before someone laughs and someone else decides to stay out later than planned.
The best time to hear Is This It arrives sometime after midnight, ideally in early autumn when the air cools just enough to justify an open window in your Midtown Arts District condo. The mood should lean toward restless nostalgia. Maybe you are remembering the early 2000s, when flip phones glowed in dark bars and the city seemed permanently young. Press play and the guitars spark like loose wires. Forty minutes later, the night feels unfinished, the streetlights a little brighter, and you may briefly suspect that if you keep moving fast enough, no one will ask you to slow down.
Megan’s favorite song on this album is “Take It Or Leave It” for its highly energetic, existential outlook on modern dating games. If you’re familiar with the conviction of Julian Casablancas, you know the man thinks out loud and is unapologetically sinister and sarcastic. Only 23 years old at the time of the album’s release, Casablancas admits he can be a dirtbag, but so what? Other contenders are too. With a Shakespearean “to be, or not to be” attitude, he acts bluntly. His potential prospect can accept him and his flaws, or find someone worse. With four distorted, descending intro chords, the track staggers in with doom. Angst erupts in each stanza. Guitar riffs scatter with rage in and out of every direction. A guttural sense of déjà vu arises with each strum. Every verse is so melodic that each one is hook-worthy.
Now, almost 25 years later, The Strokes are still the prototype for alt-indie rock. So much so that music fans are constantly drawing comparisons back to their early compositions, lyrics, and the confident, cool-boy aesthetic they have successfully upheld. New comments have appeared on decades-old late-night television performance videos of The Strokes, joking that “Julian Casablancas was pregnant with Cameron Winter at the time”. The alt-rock wheel continues to be reinvented, but in the hub lies a greased-up foundation laid by The Strokes, seeping out from underneath the garage door and straight onto the world’s stage.
Wendell’s favorite song on the album is “Someday,” which might seem an unusual choice on a record so fond of cigarettes, bad decisions, and nights that probably stretch too long. Yet the track captures something essential about Is This It: the uneasy awareness that youth is already slipping toward memory. Casablancas quietly hints at that realization in the line “In many ways they’ll miss the good old days,” delivered by someone barely old enough to be nostalgic. For a band built on shared history, the sentiment feels almost autobiographical.
Musically it is also the album’s least sleazy moment, stepping briefly out of the smoky downtown rooms the rest of the record inhabits. The guitars of Valensi and Hammond Jr. shimmer with a breezy pop brightness that owes as much to Petty as to the cool restraint of The Velvet Underground. Casablancas lets the melody breathe, revealing one of the album’s most irresistible hooks. The result is a rare pause in the chaos, a song that sounds like the band stepping outside for air and realizing, perhaps a little too early, that someday these nights will be the ones people talk about later.
The Strokes’ work can be found here and their music can be found on all streaming platforms and wherever records are sold. You’re likely to hear their songs on SiriusXM stations SiriusXMU, Alt Nation, and The Spectrum. Since releasing 2020’s The New Abnormal, the guys have largely scattered into their various side pursuits. Casablancas has continued steering the restless ship of The Voidz, while other members have surfaced in their own projects and collaborations.
The band did reportedly spend some studio time together in 2022, and we now know where some of that road leads: a new album, Reality Awaits, is scheduled to arrive in June. In the meantime, the group resurfaces occasionally for select shows, including a September appearance here at Shaky Knees Festival. Lately, those appearances have come with a sharper edge. At the recently concluded Coachella 2026, the Strokes closed one set with a montage taking aim at the CIA and U.S. foreign policy, while at another Casablancas showed up in a shirt tweaking Amazon and its founder, the kind of blunt messaging that would have felt out of character back when they were just trying to look bored in the right places.
It is, in its own way, a coming-of-age story. The same band once dismissed as well-dressed downtown kids has grown into something more pointed, less interested in playing it cool than in saying something out loud, even if it lands a little sideways. If Is This It taught us anything, it’s that cool only gets you so far. Eventually, you have to risk sounding like you mean it.
The post The Night’s Not Over: The Strokes’ ‘Is This It’ appeared first on SaportaReport.
