The New Abnormal — The Strokes
(For the record, I am fully aware of how inane it is to be criticizing music at a time like this, but I’m furloughed from work and have nothing but time on my hands)
Released: 10 April 2020
Runtime: 45:07
Label: Cult/RCA
Producer: Rick Rubin
Let’s get this out of the way: The Grammy for “most ironically prescient album title” goes to… The Strokes.
Strokes fans are always in a difficult position. We love a band that hasn’t existed for a decade and a half. The old Strokes, revivalists of late-70s New York cool in sound and image, haven’t been that band since 2003. With The New Abnormal, they seem glad to continue on the experimental, synth-laden path established in earnest seven years ago on their last LP. The result, however, is probably the most vital Strokes album in recent memory.
Is the album’s most immediately satisfying song just a Modern English guitar riff thrown in a blender with a Billy Idol chorus? Sure, and Tom Petty still deserves a writing credit on “Last Nite.” But “Bad Decisions” feels so quintessentially The Strokes, like the last dance of the night in a Lower East Side bar that used to be dangerous but now wears its grime as an aesthetic choice, that halfway through you lose yourself and just give in. The Strokes are having a fun with it, and they assume whoever’s listening is in on the joke as well.
Musically, the band plays with their New Wave and synthpop inclinations in ways that are clearly meant to be entertaining first and experimental second, a welcome improvement from Comedown Machine’s often willful oddness. The songs, mostly clocking in around the five-minute mark, give you time to inhabit the space they create. A lot of them feel like classic Strokes tracks that have been slowed down and stretched out, filling in the newly opened gaps with synths, strings, beats, and more intricate guitar work from Hammond and Valensi. Even stylistic outlier “At the Door,” which as a single I derided as a plodding six-minute Casio soundscape, works well as a middle-part breather in the context of the album. Tentative forays into disco, electropop, and psychedelia dot the album in a way that leaves you unsure if the band is wearing those genres as costumes or the other way around.
The Strokes at their best have relied on vibe as much as melody, and here they finally adopt the wise-and-weary stance of a band twenty years in. Lyrically, Casablancas wrestles with what it means to be The Strokes in 2020, opining “I want new friends, but they don’t want me” on “Brooklyn Bridge to Chorus,” perhaps the most openly he’s ever sung about his feelings toward his band’s legacy (he also pointedly mentions “diminishing returns” in the song’s outro). Across the album, he often seems to be wrestling with the dissonance between what the band wants and what the fans want, and for the first time has found a comfortable common ground. The thematic and lyrical concerns of side (or is it main now?) project The Voidz crop up occasionally, with Casablancas taking social and political ills to task in his trademark Lou Reed-esque droning.
“Chill” is never a vibe I would’ve thought to apply to the Strokes, but there’s a laid back feeling to this album that’s only enhanced by the occasional studio chatter. It’s still the Strokes, but not the “head out at midnight and party til sunrise” Strokes of yesteryear; instead, it’s the first sip of coffee and drag of a cigarette on a hungover Sunday morning, assessing the damage with a trademark shrug.
SCORE: 6.1/10
FINAL THOUGHTS: We won’t be truly satisfied with a Strokes album until we learn to stop expecting Is This It Part III, but there’s enough interplay between old and new here to keep any fan interested (and maybe even win over two or three new ones). While The Strokes are not exactly the most cohesive musical unit, the album works as a whole in the same way Comedown Machine did. Like that album, this one will likely only grow on you with repeated listening.
