The songs that separated The Strokes from ‘Is This It’
The Strokes may have ushered in the garage rock revival wave of the early 2000s, but they did so with a nonchalance that made their audiences all the more obsessive.
At that time, New York’s rock scene was defined by the ghosts of its past. The remnants of 1970s punk were few, and grunge bleeding through from the West Coast was barely making a sound at the turn of the century. Guitar music lost its home on the airwaves to pop music, but this band of young, prep school guys wasn’t interested in making hits; they just wanted to make music. They poured over their predecessors, inadvertently shaping how rock music could be revived in a landscape where it no longer fit.
Singer Julian Casablancas’ voice bore an uncanny resemblance to Lou Reed and Tom Verlaine, making for a disinterested hybrid, while drummer Fabrizio Moretti played in a similar sense as Ringo Starr, both experimental and refined. Perhaps, most importantly, The Strokes’ guitars and bass knew how to capture the perfect balance of simple and unrestrained musicianship in their riffs, and their debut album, 2001’s Is This It, is packed with sounds old and new, harnessing the mangled energy of punk in its prime, plastered with the millennium’s fresh sonics.
Never overly technical, the musicianship on Is This It favoured straightforward melodies that bore an impact, where ‘Last Nite’s’ opening riff (taken straight from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ ‘American Girl’) rattled beneath New York and beyond. ‘Someday’ hears Albert Hammond Jr’s ballad-like jingle, ‘The Modern Age’ has a dizzying solo from Nick Valensi and ‘Alone, Together’ boasts of a dominant bassline from Nikolai Fraiture, which led to the album being instantaneously heralded as the saviour of rock ‘n’ roll, throwing each member of the band onto pedestals.
Sessions for The Strokes’ sophomore album were simultaneously open to possibility and restricted by the overwhelming praise and expectations. Initially intended to be produced by Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, the band dismissed his work and instead reenlisted their debut’s producer, Gordon Raphael, to help them shape their next era.
Recorded in just three months, Room On Fire could go two ways: it could supercede expectations and become an even larger sensation than its predecessor, or be trapped in its shadow forever, and it unconsciously took the latter route. As Valensi recalled to Rolling Stone, “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. But it didn’t completely feel like we were walking into our own execution.”
Room On Fire is arguably better than its older sibling, displaying sonic maturity from the band as a whole alongside Casablancas’ songwriting, which had the same tongue-in-cheek storytelling, with a bit more vulnerability and personal flair. If critics despaired that the album was too similar to Is This It, perhaps they were right, but this was not necessarily a ‘bad’ thing, for the band rather saw it as an opportunity to venture deeper into a sound that was familiar and liberating, and they ran with it.
Room On Fire’s best songs reveal an underlying angst, wherein Casablancas sings the nostalgia-laden ‘Automatic Stop’ with a hint of a growl. ‘What Ever Happened?’ is a rapturous cut that scathingly critiques the world The Strokes found themselves in, while the venomous ‘Meet Me in the Bathroom’ would come to define the generation of indie rockers that the band helped pioneer. While the album is chock full of underappreciated, emphatic songs that reassert The Strokes’ best musical qualities, there are two in particular that the frontman believed would create distance between his band’s memory of their debut.
Speaking with Rolling Stone in 2014, Casablancas said, “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.”
‘The End Has No End’ hears him fluctuate from his signature mumbling to rattling cries, backed by spiralling instrumentals that mimic the unstable emotions. On the other hand, armed with a chorus that you can sing along to, ‘Reptilia’ is an explosion of duelling riffs and an unabating drum beat, featuring the lyric from which The Strokes took the album’s name, as Casablancas screams, “The room is on fire as she’s fixing her hair”. They both hear a confidence that was not entirely absent on the band’s debut, but one that needed time to grow.
Where Is This It introduced the five musicians as rock’s next hopefuls, Room On Fire carried some of the band’s best work, proving why they earned their high ranking in the first place, even if it was ill-fated with the curse of the sophomore album.
