The Strokes guitar riff Julian Casablancas “never liked”
While the music scene of the 2000s was a varied landscape, one band that carved out a space for themselves was The Strokes. One of the most influential outfits to emerge this century, after cutting their teeth on the burgeoning New York scene at the end of the 1990s, The Strokes would revitalise guitar music for the new epoch and prompt a wave of notable groups to rise in their wake.
The band emerged from the same spiritual tradition as The Velvet Underground and The New York Dolls. Frontman Julian Casablancas conjured tales about the filthy side of New York City on top of his bandmates’ dynamic music that stood head and shoulders above the tepid indie of the era. This character meant The Strokes were in a perfect position to re-centre culture when they broke out with their debut album Is This It in 2001.
From Casbalancas’ dry vocals to the 1970s-leaning aesthetic, many things certify The Strokes as an era-defining act. Yet, the most important is the guitar playing. Underpinned by the exceptional and somewhat overlooked twin assault of Albert Hammond Jr and Nick Valensi, there is no way that the band would have captured listeners’ imaginations without the infectious and technical brilliance of their in-house guitar heroes.
Whether it be ‘Someday’, ‘Reptilia’, or ‘Juicebox’, the pair have produced many iconic riffs celebrated for their technical prowess and infectiousness, which have had audiences chanting along for years. One of their ultimate riffs is that found in ‘You Only Live Once’ from the band’s 2005 third album, First Impressions of Earth. A catchy melody, it stands out in the band’s oeuvre for its grit and potency despite being so straightforward.
Yet, in a reflection of the kind of creative struggles that would rear their head while making their third album, leading to a five-year hiatus, in 2006, Casablancas revealed that he “never liked” the song’s central riff.
He told Clash: “There’s delay on it. I never liked it, but now it’s sort of everywhere on the record. Not crazy ’80s reverb, just enough to give a lot of the instruments space so it sounds fuller, bigger and louder. What I used to call ‘more professional.’ That ‘more professional’ sound is what we tried when we worked with Nigel Godrich on the first sessions for Room On Fire, but it wasn’t right, y’know. Which is why we went back to Gordon Raphael. Here we did it but we still felt it still sounded gritty and like us.”
Listen to ‘You Only Live Once’ below.
