The Strokes - The New Abnormal (Review)

Rock'n'Roll "saviours" return with an unexpectedly adept helping of fresh tunes...

It has been a long, long while since we've had a new studio album from The Strokes, and it's been a whole lot longer since we've had one everyone can agree on being worthy of this band's early reputation. Julian Casablancas, Albert Hammond Jr, Nick Valensi and the rest may have still been spending time making their own music, but aside from Casablancas's The Voidz there's been very little I've actually cared about in the way of side projects from other members of the band, especially with how each new release felt a little more derivative than the last, something that was also sadly true of The Strokes. That was until Comedown Machine of course, an album that succeeded in bringing some genuinely new ideas to the table whilst also pulling from just about every decade of popular music imaginable, to some very mixed results and a very cold reception. It isn't their worst album in my opinion, but most of the individual experiments felt too isolated for the album to be at all cohesive, and it suffered greatly as a result.

Since then, Julian's band The Voidz came out with the fantastic Virtue, an album that had even more extreme differences between each and every song but managed to be cohesive and fascinatingly replayable with its strong themes and solution-seeking narrative that tore down and sought to improve some of the worst aspects of our society. For me, this was the epitome of an album that took the one-style-per-song approach and succeeded in making it compelling, and it was something Julian had never been able to pull of with The Strokes. Virtue's success and Comedown Machine's failure helped to set my presidence for what I wanted out of a new album from The Strokes, and whilst what I expected and what I wanted out of it were very different things, I got neither.

Rest assured, that's not to say that this is in any way a disappointment, predominantly due to the fact that this album succeeds in meeting the bar set by Virtue at least on a presentational level. For one thing, there are some strong themes tying this collection of haphazard songs together, although they're far less sociopolitical and far more introspective and self-evaluating than perhaps anything this band or any of the members have put out. In fact, what I find surprising is how much this album reminds me of The Strokes' debut, not due to the style but due to much of the storytelling. Things have changed of course, but where much of this change and current state of mind affects the lyrical side of things, it's the delivery and self awareness that reminds me so much of that first album and I can't tell you how rewarding that is in terms of a true multi-album narrative arc: over the course of the four albums between the debut and this, The Strokes have lost themselves many times over in the attempt to change everything about them in what often came across as a very forced evolution. Sometimes the changes have payed off but, more often than not, the band have felt more committed to escaping their semblance than actually making good music together as a band.

Honesty. Raw, unfiltered and unflattering honesty. It's what characterised The Strokes' debut and it's what I haven't heard from this band in a long, long time. I can hear it here, and that all started with the subverting lead single, "At The Door". It is the most minimal song instrumentally on this album, consisting mostly of just Julian's vocals, gradually building synths and the eventual drumbeat. It uses what it needs and nothing more in order to create an experience that is visceral and painful and emotional and overflowing with that raw honesty and openness that I love about The Strokes. It's the best song here, and it's far more out there than the kookiest of experiments on Comedown Machine, more exposing and self critical than the best songs on Is This It and about as driven by frustration and dissatisfaction as "Pyramid of Bones" on Virtue. What it reminds me of most though, is the song "Pointlessness", the epic finale from Virtue that serves as the peak of existential questioning and searching for answers and reasons from someone or something, somewhere out there. To me, "At The Door" is that same searching and that same transitional uncertainty but directed inwards; to me, that's what this whole album is about... 

This album sits at a crossroads that Julian's been at for a while, but a point he seems only to have acknowledged here. It feels like he's been running from the choice, whatever it is, and the many changeups and directions he's taken both musically and lyrically on albums past have been different ways to delay this choice. I think The Strokes were always going to end up here, and I think it's made me appreciate several things that I didn't before, the two mains ones being that firstly, Room On Fire has gone overrated by me personally for far too long, as I've often neglected how much weaker the writing is there when compared to this or Is This It. Secondly, that The New Abnormal as a title for this album is absolutely a perfect descriptor for many reasons, perhaps most notably due to the insane change of pace that it is due to its consistencies in the themes, tone and writing.

The New Abnormal is an album that grapples with humanity and change through an often disjointed, mismatched and psychedelic lens that's held up as a mirror to a band that really have lost themselves many, many times. It feels like the most significant milestone in the band's career since their debut, and it packs some whopping punches with a tracklist that I feel disappoints only once, that being with the irritating production choices on the song "Brooklyn Bridge To Chorus" which, however well it works thematically, will remain a poorly written and irritating low point in my eyes. I would have to recommend this album to primarily the fans, because for me I feel like this album's impact grew the more I thought about it in context given how many misfires have preceded it. That said, it's still just a great pulsating and psychedelic experience that sees rock'n'roll's once-"saviours" return with an unexpectedly adept helping of fresh tunes and the best narrative of their career.

8/10

Best Tracks: The Adults Are Talking; Selfless; Eternal Summer; At The Door; Not The Same Anymore; Ode To The Mets
Worst Tracks: Brooklyn Bridge To Chorus

Check out the video for "At The Door"

In terms of an update on my recent ranking of all Julian Casablancas's albums which you can check out here, this is the updated ranking:
9- First Impressions Of Earth

8- Comedown Machine

7- Phrazes for the Young

6- Tyranny

5- Angles

4- Room On Fire

3- The New Abnormal

2- Virtue

1- Is This It

Thanks very much for reading, and I hope you enjoyed!

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"The New Abnormal"
The Strokes

10th April 2020

Cult Records / RCA

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