How many copies did ‘Is This It’ by The Strokes sell?
It’s one of the great establishing character moments in the history of rock. The Strokes play their first headline show in London at The Monarch, now The Camden Assembly. The previous week, their first EP, The Modern Age, dropped, and armed with that and a few more of their early tracks, they blew the assembled crowd’s tiny minds.
The moment itself changes every time it’s told. However, the crux of it is this: One true believer is left staggering around the venue after the set, losing his absolute biscuits and telling everyone who’ll listen, “It’s year zero! It’s year zero! Nothing else matters”. According to former NME editor James Oldham, it was Heavenly Records boss Jeff Barratt, but whoever it was, they were saying what the whole room was thinking.
Perhaps this level of hysteria was helped by lowered expectations. In the same interview where Oldham talks about the Monarch gig, he describes pop music at the time with the level of considered restraint and understatement you’d expect from someone who worked for the NME in the early 2000s. “Music had become basically a crime against humanity,” Oldham says, and when you had nu-metal on one side of the Atlantic and post-Britpop Noelrock on the other, he’s not far off either.
With that in mind, it’s easy to see why The Strokes had the kind of hype more associated with Papal elections than indie bands at the time. With so few decent bands surrounding them, they were more of an oasis than Oasis ever were. So, when it was time to put their money where their mouth was and release their debut album, Is This It, expectations were stratospheric.
Did the debut album by The Strokes sell well?
Critically, the album lived up to the hype. An achievement in and of itself to be sure, considering the band were poised to be pilloried as frauds if it was anything less than a total triumph. The papers were happy then, but The Strokes weren’t meant to be indie darlings. They were meant to take the fight for the soul of rock ‘n’ roll into the charts.
Limp Bizkit and Korn weren’t just big for rock bands—they were as massive as any chart-topping pop act of the day. The Strokes were meant to be their rivals, but while their album sold comfortably, they were never going to reach nu-metal levels. To put it in perspective: in its first week of release, the record sold a healthy 48,000 copies in the UK. In the US, it moved just over a third of that, with 16,000.
The truth was that The Strokes were just a little too aloof for their home country. While they were the vanguard of the so-called “garage rock revival“, it was their peers, The White Stripes, that truly went mainstream in the way that people expected of the New Yorkers. Even disciples like Strokes mega-fans Arctic Monkeys ate their lunch in terms of record sales.
To this day, The Strokes are a beloved band, but as a major cult act rather than the juggernauts they were poised to be. It’s not all bad news, though. The album had the longevity that the vast majority of their peers didn’t, and it has since sold two million copies worldwide. Truth be told, the place The Strokes occupy in modern rock feels much more suited to them than being genuine pop stars, so everything worked out for the best, in my opinion.
