“I just wanted to be one of The Strokes,” admitted Alex Turner on the Arctic Monkeys’ 2017 track Star Treatment.
Back in 2001, a 15-year-old Turner was far from the only one enamoured with one of the new millennium’s most exciting guitar bands — believed by many to have put New York City back on the rock ‘n’ roll map.
At a time when the music industry was dominated by manufactured pop stars, violent gangsta rap and angst-ridden nu-metal, The Strokes — a five-piece band with boyband looks but dive-bar charm — went against the grain. And injected some of much-needed New York cool back into the world of guitar music.
In the aftermath of 9/11, New York, and Manhattan in particular, found itself persistently in the public eye; an outpouring of empathy from all over the world encouraged its people to move past their recent tragedy and celebrate what had once made it the coolest city on the planet.
The Strokes’ guitarist Albert Hammond Jr. told The Guardian in 2015: “Although we’d listen to The Velvet Underground, The Beatles and Guided By Voices, we didn’t feel part of any sea change bringing back cool guitar bands.”
However, by looking back they saw the future — and The Strokes’ introduction to the world brought on a garage rock revival that still casts a shadow over every Fender-wielding teenage band to this day, some 24 years on.
The roots of The Strokes date back to 1997, when school friends Julian Casablancas (lead vocals), Nick Valensi (guitar) and and Fabrizio Moretti (drums) began making music together, before recruiting bassist Nikolai Fraiture shortly after, and completing the lineup with Casablancas’ childhood friend Hammond Jr., whom he had met at a boarding school in Switzerland.
Whilst the others were New York born and bred, Hammond Jr. grew up in Los Angeles with his musician father, Roy Orbison collaborator Albert Hammond.
Hammond Jr. recalled: “I ran into (Casablancas) in New York when I moved into a place near where he was working and, two weeks later, we were sharing a flat.
“I may have looked the part, but I still needed guitar lessons. Julian wrote the songs, and from the first moment, I knew we’d be successful.”
The band burst onto the scene with an image that was the absolute antithesis of nu-metal — ’70s-style leather jackets, slim fit jeans, suit blazers and ties.
These guys were stylish and charismatic, with unkempt haircuts and wielding vintage guitars.
Their sound recalled the lineage of great New York bands that preceded them — the dual-guitar interplay of Television, the three-chord simplicity of the Ramones and the new wave nonchalance of Blondie, with lyrics depicting the New York lifestyle reminiscent of Lou Reed.
The Strokes’ early performances across Manhattan’s Lower East Side have become the stuff of indie folklore, causing much word-of-mouth hype at the time and resulting in more than a few “I was there” falsehoods.
The band’s rapid ascent to rock royalty was due in equal parts to their debut album, Is This It, and its biggest single, Last Nite – a three-minute-13-second pop-rock song comprised of choppy, lo-fi guitar work and catchy, memorable hooks, with Casablancas’ melancholic lyrics smartly contrasted by the upbeat, jangly guitars and a blinding rock ’n’ roll solo.
Last Nite was originally released as a demo E.P. with two other tracks, Barely Legal and The Modern Age – the latter of which anointed NME’s Song of the Week in early 2001.
This started a bidding war for the young group, with RCA emerging as the victors. Despite the E.P.’s ripples within the industry, it wasn’t until after the album was released on 30 July 2001 that Strokesmania hit both sides of the Atlantic.
Last Nite begins with Valensi playing a memorable one-note, two-octave riff (C, for those wondering).
The other members join in one at a time, each offering something different and memorable, before building to the climactic section that, unusually, serves as both verse and a kind of chorus, with Hammond Jr. playing staccato chords not unlike reggae.
Here, Casablancas delivers his signature gruff baritone vocal performance, and stakes his claim as one of the most instantly recognisable voices in rock since the likes of Eddie Vedder and Kurt Cobain.
His slurred vocal delivery is the band’s calling card, and makes Last Nite a hell of a fun karaoke song.
After the verse, the song moves to a bridge section (with Valensi again holding that C double-octave) that is particularly reminiscent of Tom Petty’s 1977 song American Girl.
Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2006, Petty acknowledged the similarity: “A lot of rock ’n’ roll songs sound alike,” he said. “Ask Chuck Berry. The Strokes took American Girl, and I saw an interview with them where they actually admitted it. That made me laugh out loud. It doesn’t bother me.”
Discussing Last Nite on his YouTube channel, The Darkness’ Justin Hawkins shared his thoughts on any potential plagiarism claims: “It’s a brilliant song. It’s definitely inspired by (American Girl), but it bears no resemblance to it other than the tempo and the way some of the guitars are arranged.
“As a song, you’d never be able to play those two on an acoustic and suggest that they’re related at all.
“I think that’s a good way to take influence from something — and what better artist to take influence from than Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers?”
Last Nite had an ace in the hole, revealed after an instrumental bridge: Albert Hammond Jr.’s 13-second, Freddy King-inspired guitar solo, something of a rarity in the riff-centric nu-metal world of the early 2000s.
The iconic solo was featured in Total Guitar’s Greatest Guitar Solos of the 21st Century, with the magazine claiming: “In the solo-less wasteland that was the early noughties, Albert Hammond Jr. gave us this absolute pearl – a shining example of the solo you can sing.
“The punk rock snarl comes from playing C minor pentatonic over a C major chord sequence, and the tremolo-picked doublestops at the end build to a fine frenzy while keeping the loose vibe going.”
After the solo, the band rips through one more bridge and chorus before ending just as they started, with Valensi’s one-note riff rounding off a perfectly cyclical, sub-four-minute guitar anthem, destined to feature on rock playlists until the end of time.
The album, Is This It, was recorded at Transporterraum studios on Manhattan’s Lower East Village by Gordon Raphael, who had worked with the group on The Modern Age E.P. and proved to be the perfect collaborator for Casablancas’ uncompromising artistic vision.
According to Raphael, Casablancas summed up his ideal sound for the album with the following theme: “Imagine you took a time machine into the future and found a classic album from way in the past and really liked it.”
Speaking to The Guardian, Raphael said of Is This It: “It wasn’t sonically perfect, but it had some magic and emotion that was missing in the big studio stuff other bands were doing.
“Julian was a master of the cryptic instruction. He’d say, ‘This song, can you loosen its tie a little?’ He wanted his voice to sound ‘like your favourite blue jeans – not totally destroyed, but worn-in, comfortable’.”
Across the recording sessions, Casablancas would sing into an Audio-Technica 4033 microphone, which was then put through either an Avalon 737 tube preamp and compressor, or the singer’s own Peavey practice amp for a thick, distorted sound, keeping the band’s love of lo-fi indie on proud display.
In the book Meet Me In The Bathroom, Lizzy Goodman’s retrospective of the early 2000s New York music scene (named after a Strokes song), The Killers’ drummer Ronnie Vannucci Jr. commented: “I remember hearing Is This It. I was like ‘Oh, it’s cool. It’s got such a cool sound. It sounds like headphone bleed, but it sounds great’. They didn’t give a fuck, and I like that.”
Raphael added: “While recording the album, we had a visit from the label. They said it was crappy-sounding and unprofessional, and I was ruining Julian’s voice and killing any chance the band had of a career. It was very satisfying when the album became a modern classic.”
As iconic as Last nite itself is its accompanying video. Directed by Roman Coppola — son of legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola — the grainy, low-budget clip shunned a high-concept premise, opting instead for the band simply playing in their own clothes on a well-lit soundstage.
The Strokes were reluctant to appear in a music video at all, and ultimately decided to perform the song live instead of miming to a studio backing track — a throwback to 1970s performance videos before budgets became hyper-inflated and musicians were expected to become actors.
With mistakes left in, including Moretti knocking over both overhead drum mics, the video captured the band’s ramshackle appeal and gave an insight into the raucous live show they had been perfecting at the time.
This depiction of the band — Converse on, confident and ever so slightly surly, oozing disinterested cool — became their default image, one that many will still think of when picturing the group to this day.
The guitarists’ love of vintage gear is also on full display, with Valensi playing a 1995 Epiphone Riviera in a natural finish and Hammond Jr. a white 1985 Fender Stratocaster — models which both players have become synonymous with throughout their careers.
The video became a staple on MTV2, and its aesthetic was so easily recognisable that it was ripe for parody only a year later in Sum 41’s Still Waiting — conceived with Casablancas’ input.
In its 15 years since going live on YouTube, the Last Nite video has amassed a commendable 131 million views (and that’s on top of the countless eyeballs glued to television screens when the song first aired in 2001).
Upon its release, Is This It was met with instant acclaim from critics. Joe Levy of Rolling Stone magazine began his review with “This is the stuff of which legends are made”, while the album received a perfect 10 rating in the NME, with writer John Robinson declaring it “one of the best and most characterful debut albums of the last 20 years”.
Though the album eventually went platinum, Is This It did not become a commercial success in its native USA at first, but would find greater immediate success in the UK, where it peaked at No.2 in the album charts, with Last Nite coming in at No.14.
In Meet Me In The Bathroom, photographer Leslie Lyons recalled The Strokes’ first live shows in the UK: “By the time they hit the stage they were already superstars. The pictures were all over the English press and their shows were backing up what people were seeing in the pictures.
“Nothing was left behind in New York. The look, the sound, the energy was presented in full force.”
The band had already lit the touchpaper on their first UK tour, including a notably buzzy show at London’s Astoria, but later that summer, performances at T in the Park and Reading and Leeds festivals massively increased the band’s profile in the UK. Astonishingly, The Strokes returned as Reading and Leeds headliners just one year later.
New York City and England were quick to champion The Strokes, and though it took longer, the rest of America eventually caught up.
In January 2002, The Strokes performed Last Nite and Hard to Explain on Saturday Night Live (introduced with great enthusiasm by music-loving actor Jack Black), causing the steady US sales of Is This It to double.
Speaking of the band’s influence in Meet Me In The Bathroom, journalist Marc Spitz said: “The Strokes were making New York travel with them. I saw kids in Connecticut and Maine and Philadelphia and DC looking like they had been drinking on Avenue A all night. 16-year-old kids with white belts, Converse and greasy hair…
“They found a band they wanted to be like. They found their band.”
The success of Is This It — in part due to the popularity of Last Nite — made the band a household name, with their 2003 follow-up Room On Fire peaking at No.2 on the UK albums charts and No.4 on the US Billboard 200.
Numerous New York bands rose to prominence in The Strokes’ wake, including Interpol, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs and LCD Soundsystem.
Meanwhile, in Las Vegas, a little-known band called The Killers hit a creative reset after hearing The Strokes, with frontman Brandon Flowers admitting he scrapped almost all of the band’s songs as he didn’t believe they were up to the standard of Is This It.
The media’s fixation on the group was so enormous that they became the benchmark that every new band was compared to, with Kings of Leon even dubbed the “Southern-fried Strokes”.
Across the Atlantic, The Strokes’ reputation resulted in a number of UK acts beginning to make up ground, such as Franz Ferdinand, The Libertines, The Cribs and Razorlight, and in the case of Arctic Monkeys, formed directly as a result of them.
Speaking to the NME in 2011, Alex Turner spoke on the impact of Is This It: “I used to play (it) in college all the time, when our band was first starting. Loads of people were into them, so loads of bands coming out sounded like them.
“And I remember consciously trying not to sound like The Strokes, deliberately taking bits out of songs that sounded too much like them, but I still loved that album.”
However, despite being arguably the most influential rock song of the early 21st century, the ubiquity of Last Nite signature song has seen it veer dangerously close to ‘overplayed’ territory.
In fact, Last Nite may not be the ‘cool’ choice of most beloved Strokes’ song for diehard fans. A quick look on the band’s unofficial subreddit would suggest Someday, Hard To Explain and 12:51 as the true fan favourites.
That said, Last Nite it remains an irreplaceable live staple for the band to this day.
In a predicament not unlike that of Radiohead with Creep, Casablancas himself appears to have outgrown his band’s breakthrough hit. He told The Guardian in 2024: “Last Nite is pretty dead to me. I’m not sure why.
“There are some others that are comparable in terms of crowd reaction that I’m not quite as sick of. If I heard it on the radio, I’d probably turn it off.”
Despite Casablancas’ reservations, the enduring appeal of Last Nite cannot be denied.
Its impressive 725-million-plays-and-counting on Spotify sees it dwarf the group’s other songs, with Reptillia coming second with around 100 million fewer listens. Perhaps Casablancas himself said it best in Last Nite’s Petty-referencing bridge: “In spaceships they won’t understand/And me, I ain’t ever gonna understand…”
These days The Strokes’ five members focus on a variety of other projects, regrouping semi-regularly for festival dates and less regularly to record new music, but in the eyes of many, the band will always be defined by their seismic impact at the turn of the century.
As Joe Colly wrote for Pitchfork’s 200 Best Albums of the 2000s: “You only capture this kind of lightning in a bottle once”.
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