Hear the isolated drum and bass for The Strokes song ‘Reptilia’
Of all the indie outfits to emerge in the early ’00s, The Strokes are perhaps the most definitive. Even before The Libertines broke onto the London scene, they were honing an accessible, garage sound that seemed to capture what it meant to be young, free and careless in the new millennium. This isolated recording of the bass and drums from 2003’s ‘Reptilia’ offers an insight into how Julian Casablancas and company developed their era-ensnaring sound.
‘Reptilia’ features all the sonic trademarks that made The Strokes so utterly impossible to dismiss. A motoric rock beat drives Nick Velensi’s angular riffs, which are softened only by Casablancas’s sloping and faintly mournful vocals. While the song’s title – a reference to the part of our brain we share with reptiles – doesn’t actually feature in the song, the lyrics do contain the line “the room is on fire as she’s fixing her hair,” which gave The Strokes the name of this, their second studio album.
Room On Fire began life in the hands of Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich. Unfortunately, The Strokes were unhappy with his work on the record and replaced him with Gordon Raphael, who the band knew from his work on This Is It. This trade-off may have had something to do with why, on release, the album was criticized for sounding too much like The Strokes’ debut.
Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2014, Casablancas confessed that he’d never wanted Room On Fire to sound distinct from This Is It. In fact, he still had the group’s first album in mind when he was writing the material for Room On Fire: “I wanted to finish the Is This It thought; even when we were doing it, I always thought it was part two. 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.”
Valensi would later elaborate on the struggles The Strokes faced while crafting their sophomore album, the most central of which was the sheer amount of pressure they felt following the success of This Is It. “There were going to be a bunch of people who loved that record no matter what, and a bunch of people who hated that record no matter what,” he told Rolling Stone Australia. “But it didn’t completely feel like we were walking into our own execution.”
