Hear Me Out: ‘One Way Trigger’ is The Strokes’ most under-appreciated song
The story of Comedown Machine by The Strokes is truly baffling.
After being hailed as the band to singlehandedly return rock ‘n’ roll to cultural relevancy in the early 2000s, The Strokes released one album that delivered on that promise (their debut effort, Is This It), then a handful of records that did not. To be clear, it’s not that Room On Fire and First Impressions of Earth are bad records. In fact, most of the songs on there are pretty good. The problem, as it so often is, was expectations.
Because, come on now, how on earth do you live up to that level of expectation? Most folks don’t even really know what they mean when they call a band “the saviours of rock”. Not to mention how The Strokes themselves absolutely didn’t ask for that level of worship. This level of backlash, plus the band’s relationship with each other becoming infamously toxic, led to a five-year break that many thought the band would never, ever come back from.
In 2011 though, they did. However, something was still not right within The Strokes. Their comeback record, Angles, was much like their previous two. Decent, but not a whole lot to write home about. The band slouched out on tour with all the vim and vigour of a bunch of 15-year-olds going back to school, but few people outside of the most devoted Strokaholics thought there was much life left in the band. This made a follow-up record to Angles on heck of a shock, but it gets even weirder from there.
Almost as soon as Comedown Machine was announced, the band also announced that the record would arrive with a media blackout. After the media blitz that Angles had arrived under, proclaiming The Strokes’ grand comeback from obscurity, Comedown Machine was the complete opposite. The record would have no press, no interviews, no photoshoots and, most bafflingly, no tour to accompany it. The record basically didn’t even have any cover art to boot, being made up to look like an old RCA tape reel box.
What about this record by The Strokes was worth salvaging?
The strange part was that the news of this media blackout came after the band had released the first single from Comedown Machine. Granted, “released” is a strong word to describe what they did. If we want to be brutally honest, so is “single”. What The Strokes really did was pick one of the record’s songs and put it up as a free download on their website. The closest thing to a promotional tactic was a stylised lyric sheet for the song that Julian Casablancas had designed by frequent collaborator Warren Fu and, curiously enough, had put up on his personal website rather than, y’know, the band’s.
Be real with me, does any of this sound like the band had any faith in this record? Are these the actions of a band with a record they feel is going to level the earth and make them the rock heroes they were promised to be a decade previously? Absolutely not. At the time, this smacked of a band being forced to put something out which no member of The Strokes were actually happy with, which is to say nothing of the fanbase’s reaction to the song itself. As a so-called “lead single”, ‘One Way Trigger’ was a truly baffling choice among truly baffling choices.
After a decade of making stylishly raucous, classic-rock inflected post-punk, ‘One Way Trigger’ reminded the world of nothing more than A-Ha’s ‘Take On Me’. Built around a driving new wave rhythm, a nagging, staccato synth hook and most strange of all, Julian Casablancas showing off a pretty gorgeous falsetto in the chorus. People had their minds made up. The Strokes were done. This is despite the fact that ‘One Way Trigger’ is one of the best songs they’d done in years and by an absolute mile the best thing The Strokes did in the 2010s.
Yes, ‘One Way Trigger’ was a stylistic left turn, but it was one that the band achieved with style, grace and panache. This isn’t a rock band leaning into a more pop-oriented sound for the fuck of it. See Green Day getting their Franz Ferdinand on in the horrifically cringe ‘Kill The DJ’ for proof of what that sounds like. The Strokes actually know how to combine their sound with the style of 1980s New Wave and lean right into it. However, where did the band learn these styles?
After all, ‘One Way Trigger’ sounds nothing like anything on Angles. It obviously sounds nothing like the records the band made previously, so what gives? The truth is that the Rosetta Stone of ‘One Way Trigger’ lies not in The Strokes’ recorded output, but in the solo work of Julian Casablancas and especially guitarist Albert Hammond Jr. The latter would actually take ‘One Way Trigger’ and make it the one Strokes song he’d play at his solo shows, a testament to how much he values the song.
Today, though, he’s not alone in that. ‘One Way Trigger’ has had a major re-evaluation in the eyes of The Strokes’ fans, as has the majority of Comedown Machine. I was there from the beginning. I knew, no matter how many people dismissed it as a ‘Take On Me’ rip-off, that this was a Strokes classic, and unquestionably the most under-appreciated song in their back catalogue.
