After their years of youthful rock star indiscretion and then years apart after that, the Strokes have really pulled themselves together on The New Abnormal.
There are bands who live in the shadow of their debut, and then there’s the Strokes. On one hand, the Strokes gave us Is This It, one of the most influential indie albums of all time, the centerpiece of the 2000s indie rock explosion chronicled in the book Meet Me in the Bathroom, and the album that spawned countless Strokes knockoffs. There’s a reason Alex Turner opened the most recent Arctic Monkeys album with the line “I just wanted to be one of the Strokes.”
On the other hand, the Strokes quickly learned about the law of diminishing returns. Room on Fire was almost as good as their debut, First Impressions of Earth wasn’t bad, Angles had its moments, and Comedown Machine was…okay I guess. This studio album timeline brings us all the way to 2013, and the band hasn’t released anything since the terse Future Present Past EP in 2016. Instead, the band members’ various solo and side projects stole the show in the 2010s, with both Albert Hammond, Jr. and Julian Casblancas with the Voidz giving us some great songs recently.
The New Abnormal might get you to start thinking of the Strokes as a whole again. It’s got enough of their earlier sounds to bring back anyone who disregarded them for the past decade, and it goes in enough new directions to show they’re not just catering to what worked previously. After their years of youthful rock star indiscretion and then years apart after that, the Strokes have really pulled themselves together here.
It was always going to be tough for the older millennials who got hooked on the Strokes from Is This It and Room on Fire to part ways with the band’s early, much-replicated, signature sound. This probably explains some, but not all, of the lukewarm reception to the Strokes’ later releases. However, The New Abnormal has a noticeable amount of 2000s-era Strokes sounds on it. The album’s second single “Bad Decisions” is the key example here, a track that has so many trappings of “old Strokes” that it almost feels like fan service. Still, don’t feel bad about really enjoying it, even though it borrows so heavily from “Dancing With Myself” that the band gave Billy Idol co-writing credit for it. Within their own catalogue, “Selfless” has the same guitar melody as “Electricityscape” from First Impressions of Earth, albeit with a more dream pop tone. It even throws in some guitar solos, and the transition between Casablancas’ starting vocals and ending shouts make it a standout.
At the same time, The New Abnormal is far from the Strokes throwing in the towel and retreating entirely back to the comfort of their old sound. My reaction to the album’s first single “At the Door” was, “What is this, Daft Punk? Where are the drums? There’s barely any guitar on this! Is this really just Casablancas and a bunch of synths?” After several more listens…I feel more or less the same, and the single turned out to be a bit of a red herring that sounds nothing like the rest of The New Abnormal. It’s an interesting new wave song and all, especially once it finds its groove about halfway through, but it would be a much better fit for Casblancas’ experimental side project the Voidz. “Brooklyn Bridge to Chorus” is the Strokes’ take on danceable synthpop, and it works surprisingly well. It also sounds quite a bit like Two Door Cinema Club, who ironically have no doubt drawn inspiration from the 2000s Strokes. “Eternal Summer” attempts to take the glitz up even further, yet its slow tempo combined with its six-minute runtime (the longest Strokes song ever!) make it a bit of a slog. Casablancas sings in falsetto throughout its verses, but this effect is much better when applied sparingly, as on The New Abnormal’s opener “The Adults are Talking.” This track starts with the relatively muted feel of Comedown Machine, but builds towards a much more climatic finish, with prominent drum and bass providing continuity.
The last three tracks on The New Abnormal deserve special mention for ending it on such a strong streak. “Why Are Sunday’s So Depressing?” has some of the best usage of the band’s dual guitars on the album, but it should be dinged for that misplaced apostrophe in the title. Speaking of titles, the self-referential “Not the Same Anymore” switches on and off between dreary verses and more forceful choruses that are bursting with Albert Hammond, Jr.’s immediately recognizable riffs. It’s also got one of the best guitar solos on the album. Closing track “Ode to the Mets” seems like it’ll be a quiet, solemn last song for the first minute and a half, until the percussion kicks in as Casablancas politely requests “drums please, Fab.” From then on out, it’s the whole band giving it their all as it ebbs and flows in intensity. All three of these tracks have the trappings of the well-established Strokes style, be it their guitar effects or Casablancas’ distinctive garbled vocals, yet sound fresh by bringing in touches like a synthesizer line or letting Casablancas really belt out his words.
I’m not contrarian enough to suggest that The New Abnormal is better than Is This It, Room on Fire, or maybe even First Impressions of Earth. Casablancas himself called it the fourth best album he’s ever been a part of, putting the first two Strokes album before it (the third is a mystery). Some of the bolder attempts at ingenuity on The New Abnormal are less than successful, there’s multiple slow burners on it, and most tracks could have done with some tightening up around their ends. This aside, it will probably exceed your expectations. For a band who dominated the 2000s and then faltered in the 2010s, The New Abnormal is a promising start to the 2020s for the Strokes.
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