Watch The Strokes improvise a song while fixing an amp
New York indie gods The Strokes hit on a new level of chemistry as the 2020s rolled around. After taking most of the 2010s off, there was a definitive need to innovate. The band’s last album before taking a lengthy hiatus, 2013’s Comedown Machine, was a highly electronic effort that was supported by no tour, no interviews, and no plans for the immediate future. Rumours of internal friction kept bouncing around, and over the course of the next seven years, the only release from the group was the 2016 EP Past, Present, Future.
But with the help of super producer Rick Rubin, The Strokes stage one of the more impressive comebacks of recent memory with 2020’s The New Abnormal. Bursting at the seams with some of the band’s best material since their initial heyday in the early 2000s, The New Abnormal was a mix of the band’s rough-and-ready indie rock origins with their interest in exploring new sonic territories.
The band were set to release the LP and tour behind when they hit a snag: the Covid-19 pandemic. The band’s planned 2019 tour was subject to technical issues, rain-outs, and eventually, full-on cancellation as the world came to a stop. Undeterred, the group released The New Abnormal in April 2020, receiving some of the best reviews of their entire career.
When it finally became viable to tour behind the record, the group wasn’t about to let minor inconveniences hold them back. But the inconveniences did happen, like when a busted amp put a brief pause on the band’s performance at the TRNSMT Festival in 2022. After performing ‘The Modern Age’ as their opening song, one of the band’s amps (likely one of Nick Valensi’s guitar amps) goes on the fritz.
To kill time, Fab Moretti begins improvising a song on the keyboard next to his drum kit. Julian Casablancas jumps in quickly, improvising lyrics while messing with a vocal modulator. The lyrics that Casablancas spins are mostly about how embarrassing it is to just be sitting there in front of 20,000 people and not being able to play. The crowd starts to get into it, and soon enough, so do Nikolai Fraiture and Albert Hammond, Jr.
At a certain point, Casablancas goes for a vocal run, adjusts his course, and then laughs as he describes it as “almost sounding like a Maroon 5 song”. After knocking out lyrics about slipping into a puddle and musing on the difficulty of singing about faeces, Casablancas mostly gives up as the amp finally gets fixed. It’s all just a bit of fun, showing off the renewed sense of camaraderie felt between the band members.
Check out the improvised song down below.
