The career of every great rock hope comes wildly front-loaded, but rarely as drastically as The Strokes’. The quintet exploded out of Manhattan at the dawn of this millennium with an achingly cool design classic of a debut album that they’ve never come close to matching. Two decades later, they are actually deep into a respectable second act, though it seems they will never again hit the same heights they enjoyed when first conquering the world as the last in a long line of iconic skinny-jeaned NYC rockers stretching back to the Ramones, Television and The Velvet Underground.
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The Strokes were unlikely rock stars. Educated at elite private schools, they were products of gentrified Manhattan rather than the city’s grungy downtown history referenced in their archly retro image and music. All the same, they looked and sounded fantastic, astutely reviving a stripped-down garage-rock aesthetic in an era when bloated nu-metal and slick dance-pop dominated the US charts. Their meticulously constructed songs were lean, propulsive and addictive, providing a beautifully stark sonic canvas for those sublime moments when Julian Casablancas broke out…
