‘Threat of Joy’: the best song from The Strokes’ second chapter
Enough has been said about the New York City scene at the turn of the millennium without me adding my two pence. But, while I am here, I may as well. So many bands played an integral role in defining it, such as The Walkmen, Interpol, and LCD Soundsystem, to mention a few, but none of them were as impactful as The Strokes. They were the kings of Manhattan, mixing a scruffy aesthetic with a distorted garage sound, responsible for lighting the flame that blazed over indie music for the coming decade.
Their debut record, Is This It, was an all-killer-no-filler masterclass in indie rock, setting out the guidelines upon which the new century’s fashion and music would follow. The lo-fi distortion was an iconic sonic blueprint that, when played on Albert Hammond Jr’s uncomfortably high guitar and sung with Julian Casablancas’ snarling vocals, gave a voice to the rock-loving underground.
“I remember I used to play that first album in college all the time,” Alex Turner once said, remembering the album’s influence. “When our band was first starting, loads of people were into them, so loads of bands coming out sounded like them. And I remember consciously trying not to sound like The Strokes, deliberately taking bits out of songs that sounded too much like them, but I still loved that album.”
The band that went on to define the 20 years that followed their debut made no bones about their love for that debut record, and, as such, its cultural influence can’t be understated. Their follow-up effort in 2003, Room On Fire, was an equally accomplished piece of work. While they turned down the reverb, the very crux of what made Is This It so appealing was celebrated once more.
“I wanted to finish the Is This It thought; even when we were doing it, I always thought it was part two [of Is This It],” Casablancas told Rolling Stone in 2014. “I remember when we started ‘Reptilia’ and ‘The End Has No End’, I was like, ‘This is the new vibe.’ I think we always felt like we were in jeopardy. When we did Room on Fire, things were established, but things were internally, at least from my perspective, not healthy.”
In 2014, when Casablancas was musing over the “vibe” that papered over internal cracks and stamped the bands’ sonic imprint on the world, The Strokes were actually at somewhat of a career crossroads. After the release of their 2006 album First Impressions of Earth, the appetite for their band was beginning to disappear as the children of their influence took their sound and expanded it into different realms.
After a five-year break, they returned with Angles in 2011, which boasted stellar tracks like ‘Macchu Picchu’ and ‘Under Cover of Darkness’. This marked the second chapter of The Strokes’ story, which would bring with it fresh interpretations of their muffled indie-rock. 2013’s Comedown Machine had bright moments but ultimately failed to halt the slow petering off of their influence.
However, in 2016, two years after Casablancas’ quote about the vibe of those early records, the band released a track that would stand proudly alongside their early work. ‘Threat of Joy’ was the third track from their Future Present Past EP, packing their future nostalgia into a smooth mid-tempo number that was fit for Casablancas to pare his vocals back slightly and find that character once again.
Laid on top of a guitar melody that captures the sound that feels so innately The Strokes, with equal measures of a straddling groove and grunge aesthetics, it was a track that didn’t place them at the tip of innovation’s arrowhead, but instead into the hearts of fans by plainly revisiting their blueprint.
But avoiding the cliche of just another band trying to recapture their youth, Casablancas’ lyrics add to the rear-view mirror approach of the song. “Okay, I see how it is now / You don’t have time to play with me anymore /That’s how it goes, I guess / Fuck the rest”, he sings on the opening verse, raising questions about his subject. Is it a jab at the perceived baselessness of both the media and fans’ fickle nature, who want The Strokes to remain in the box they fearlessly carved on their opening record, making the entire track of nostalgia one big joke?
It’s a track with one foot in the past, offering fans an up-front version of what they have so desperately craved, and with the other in the future, pondering on what could be without the constraints of history. As a fan, I’ve never wanted artists I like to feel consigned to one creative box, yet there is something so innately triggering and nostalgic about The Strokes that you can’t help but feel endeared to a rehashing of it. Its lyrical content steers it clear of retrospective karaoke and instead gives us one last swansong to The Strokes we grew up on.
