Spectreview: The Strokes – The New Abnormal

The Strokes continue to redefine themselves on their downcast, endearingly awkward sixth album.

-PURPLE-

For a guide to the review color rating system, click here.

“You’re not the same anymore
Don’t wanna play that game anymore
You’d make a better window than a door”

Every second of the day, there are people around the world fighting against themselves, regretting their mistakes and their failures. For as long as most of us remember, The Strokes have been doing the same thing, but against a resounding success. As influential as Is This It ended up being, it still casts a long shadow over everything the aging band has been doing since. That’s what happens when young artists get famous off of the youth they project. It happened with the Stones, it happened with Pearl Jam, and it’s tragically happening now, when rock music has mattered less than ever.

The New Abnormal, content-wise, isn’t much different from the hodge-podge of their last record, or the creative fatigue of Angles, or even the enterprising genre bounce of First Impressions of Earth. In a sense, the sample size is great enough where this is definitively their sound, not what was going on in their debut or follow-up Room on Fire. A meat-and-potatoes interpretation of the ’70’s and ’80’s that’s amalgamative and deeply, deeply uncool: that’s been The Strokes for much longer than they were cover-gracing superstars, which is why it’s heartening to find their fanbase enduringly receptive to this direction.

Anyone who listens to The New Abnormal and decries it as tired or joyless is missing the point. Of course it sounds kind of tired; of course it sounds kind of joyless. This is a band who got famous off of a mixture of youthful charisma and equally youthful music, did nothing to promulgate their platform, saw their peers rapidly overtake them, and fell from grace trying to do what they wanted instead of what was expected of them. They survived drug abuse, the allure of celebrity cognoscenti, and the crushing weight of impossible expectations. At one point, they hated each other; they might still. No band gets through that kind of damage unscathed, and every Strokes release (along with any number of side projects) bears those scars, yet somehow these albums succeed in spite of themselves. Maybe it’s because there’s no way this collection of people could release music that’s not catchy in some way. Maybe it’s that they consistently borrow from styles and sounds that have remained timeless. Regardless, there’s some paradoxical quality about new Strokes releases that keep them somewhat in the good graces of music listeners everywhere, despite what, in context, they actually are: semi-ambitious, semi-obligatory stabs at rewriting their history.

The New Abnormal is no different in that regard, but it might be their most intriguing work since perhaps First Impressions. For one, it’s at least partially grounded by a concept, even if it’s not entirely executed gracefully. There are subtle asides to a commonly-addressed bleak future, like the ecological disaster covered on the facetiously-titled “Endless Summer” or the snipes at late-stage capitalism on opening number “The Adults Are Talking.” But mostly there’s just cold, dispassionate regret: that classic internal conversation about “the old times” pops up throughout the record like a fair-weather friend, but Casablancas sings about his past, his relationships, and his old drinking habits with the weary air of a man whose demons still haunt him.

Those lyrics (and Casablancas’ odd, tchotchke-like falsetto) make this outing as depressing as, well, anything else the Strokes have put out since, but for the first time that mood works in the album’s favor, making it more than the sum of its parts. You shouldn’t expect anything genuinely novel about what they’re doing here, and there are moments that are disconcertingly regressive (for instance, even getting close to a Beach House sound in 2020, on “Selfless”), but for perhaps the first time, expecting The Strokes to take this angle heightens all of these moments. First single “At The Door” had the potential to be a complete drag in its drumless slog; here, it becomes a stark resemblance of a torch song that reads as genuinely touching. With its clumsy mixture of brainless party-pop and eco-friendly righteousness (complete with a baffling left-turn into British anthem rock), “Eternal Summer” straight-up should not work, but it ends up being one of the record’s most enjoyable tracks. Closer “Ode to the Mets,” meanwhile, makes its mark in the pantheon of strange Strokes closing songs, with a fake-out intro and a dour tone that would be colorless if Casablancas’ flailing vocal didn’t make it so endearingly poignant.

Even the ventures into their old territory work better than usual. The catchy “Why Are Sundays So Depressing” feels derivative at first, until you realize that they were the people that helped invent this sound, making it eerily akin to listening to The Rolling Stones doing hard rock on their newest albums. “Bad Decisions” boasts as killer a guitar riff as any Strokes song in recent memory, even if it’s just a rip of any given Britrock band a la Modern English.

Ultimately it’s the feeling of urgent desperation mingling with Casablancas’ awkwardness that weirdly sells it all, and you’ll likely find yourself embracing this record against your better judgement. The New Abnormal is not a return to form, or a bold new avenue, or even a canny self-assessment from a kennel of tired old dogs, but it is a surprisingly enjoyable experience from a band of people who are still willing to put their best feet forward against everything that continues to weigh them down.

Recommended for shaking off the self-cringe.