The Strokes’ comeback plays on self-deprecating humour

Snobbish, ultra-trendy, incredibly cool, perpetually giving the impression they’re doing you a favour, The Strokes were the world champions of indie rock in the run-up to 11 September, before fading rapidly, along with their youth. Yet faded but not dead: now, in keeping with a well-established rule of pop music, having reached their fifties, they’ve re-emerged with a look entrusted to a professional stylist, whilst musically picking up more or less where they left off, with inevitable echoes of the past. Twenty years ago, Julian Casablancas’s band was not just a rock group: it was the synecdoche of a New York that was reinventing itself after the shock of the Twin Towers, in a downtown scene made up of lofts rented with daddy’s money, leather jackets even at 35 degrees and a classism masked by apathy. ‘Is This It’, which is celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary, is the album that cemented the equation between rock ’n’ roll and the Big Apple for a generation: minimalist guitars, dry drums, a singer who seemed bored even when he was screaming. A legend decoded in the collection of oral histories "Meet Me in the Bathroom", written by Lizzy Goodman – the unofficial bible of that scene, to which now semi-forgotten bands such as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Interpol belonged. It was the final revival of the garage sound, the last time a guitar band dictated the city’s musical mood, before the city itself became, above all, an export brand.

The problem with having been the origin of it all is that everything else ends up resembling you. Today’s most talked-about indie band, Geese, is pure post-Strokes sound, even though they were formed when Casablancas and co. were already legends. Now, however, unexpectedly, the Strokes have made a comeback, including live performances, with their first tour in twenty years and a headlining slot at Coachella, in front of a mix of clueless teenagers and CBGB veterans, and they’re going all out with "Reality Awaits", their seventh studio album and first since 2020, which features nine tracks produced by Rick Rubin and recorded in Costa Rica. The sound has changed little. ‘Is This It’ operated by subtraction: two guitars intertwined in minimal loops, a voice compressed to the point of sounding as if forced through an intercom, all in three minutes. ‘Reality Awaits’ expands beyond that, sometimes changing direction mid-song and processing Casablancas’s vocals with a conspicuous autotune effect, which sounds like a confession about his own ageing. The opening track, “Psycho Shit”, begins with soundtrack-style arpeggios and takes five minutes to explode, whilst “Dine N’Dash” has a post-punk feel before slipping into spoken word with a surreal, fake English accent. The Voidz element – Casablancas’ experimental solo project – can be glimpsed almost everywhere: in “Liar’s Remorse”, the singer indulges in a shift from a Caribbean-style falsetto to a filtered trumpet solo. “Lonely in the Future” is a dig at the online generation and YouTube music critics. The single “Going Shopping” is the track that best strikes a balance between the old-school Television-style guitar interplay between Valensi and Hammond Jr. and the new vocal choices, with Casablancas singing about wanting to “be a two-metre starfish”.

The rest of the album veers in and out of self-parody, and even the cover – a photomontage by the artist Johann Rashid based on Richard Prince’s famous photograph ‘(Untitled) Cowboy’ – plays on the idea of appropriating an American icon, reworking it and subverting the original. The album’s launch followed the same logic of nostalgic seduction: a teaser featuring an image of an old vintage Nissan 300ZX and a hundred cassette tapes sent by post to the most loyal fans, containing the first recording of ‘Going Shopping’. So who, first and foremost, is this album aimed at? It’s aimed at those who have followed the band long enough to accept their evolution, and at those who find a band more interesting when it’s willing to risk looking ridiculous rather than modernising itself through stereotypical adjustments. This is The Strokes, and they’ll always be like this: it’s an album for true connoisseurs of the genre and seasoned fans, but not for nostalgia tourists – consistent with the spirit of their origins. Critics have been divided between those who have dismissed the album as a collection of bizarre gimmicks – the Auto-Tune, the fake accents, the out-of-context solos – and those who see it as an ironic anthology conceived by four millionaires. They can afford to poke fun at themselves, given that they do so with unrivalled class. After twenty-five years of setting the benchmark for others, The Strokes are now measuring themselves against themselves and what remains of their city’s sound: the result does not set out to be memorable, but it more than sufficiently embodies the hallmarks of wisdom, taste and intelligence.