The Strokes are releasing their 6th album The New Abnormal in April, and have been in the news a bit lately, announcing the record while performing at a Bernie Sanders rally in New Hampshire, so here's a look at their catalog so far

The Strokes deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Soma
2. Barely Legal
3. New York City Cops
4. When It Started
5. Take It Or Leave It
6. Is This It
7. The Way It Is
8. Automatic Stop
9. What Ever Happened?
10. Meet Me In The Bathroom
11. Under Control
12. I Can't Win
13. Razorblade
14. Electricityscape
15. Ize Of The World
16. Two Kings Of Happiness
17. You're So Right
18. Machu Picchu
19. Gratisfaction
20. Call It Fate, Call It Karma
21. Welcome To Japan
22. 50/50
23. Drag Queen
24. Threat Of Joy

Tracks 1, 3, 4, 5 and 6 from Is This It (2001)
Tracks 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 from Room On Fire (2003)
Tracks 13, 14 and 15 from First Impressions Of Earth (2006)
Tracks 16, 17, 18 and 19 from Angles (2011)
Tracks 20, 21 and 22 from Comedown Machine (2013)
Tracks 23 and 24 from the Future Present Past EP (2016)

I was 19 when Is This It came out, and I felt like I was either a little too old or way too young to get caught up in the media hype about The Strokes. Maybe I just loved Television too much to tolerate the comparisons, but mostly I thought they were kind of over-the-top retro to the point of being campy, like The Black Crowes or something. And I like plenty of Black Crowes songs, I'm just saying, they are embarrassing. The songs grew on me eventually, though. I wound up really liking Is This It and thought Room On Fire was almost as good.

I think it's one of the appropriate ironies of Is This It is that the album finally went platinum in 2011, more like a classic alternative sleeper hit that takes a decade or two to sell a million like Violent Femmes or They Might Be Giants' Flood than a band that got breathless magazine coverage right out of the gate. Another is that the band who was heralded as bringing sex and danger back to rock'n'roll had to release the album in their home country without the more suggestive UK cover art as well as without its edgiest song, "New York City Cops" (although I always thought the song sounded a little silly, like they were The Monkees playing impish pranks on police officers). I think the song that replaced it on the US edition, "When It Started," is a little better, although it's a short album so it'd be fine with either or both. And yes, I deliberately sequenced the playlist to suggest there's some kind of recurring theme with the word "it" in the Strokes' song titles, particularly early on.

I think "Soma" is one of their best songs, but I also think the other "Soma" by Smashing Pumpkins is about ten times better. But my favorite Strokes album might honestly be "What Ever Happened?" which is just such a killer opener. I was surprised to see some late period non-singles ("Machu Picchu," "Threat Of Joy," and "Call It Fate, Call It Karma") among the band's most popular songs on Spotify. But then, I kind of wrote the band off after "Juicebox," still such a memorably awful nosedive from a band that had up to that point had a pretty solid track record. First Impressions Of Earth has better songs than that, but I think they still had to slowly recover from that falling off on the later albums and a good 2016 EP that I didn't even know about. The new "Bad Decisions" is pretty nice, so I'm cautiously optimistic that this band who I kind of considered to be on the decline from day 1 might still have some life in them.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 19, 2020 at 2:48 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.