I was a Strokes fan back in the day. I discovered them in a music store in a mall in 2001, when I bought their first album Is This It on CD. I loved it instantaneously as a sugar-rush amalgam of every under-celebrated New Wave band: Television, the Modern Lovers, a dollop of Doug Yule-era Velvet Underground, even a whiff of the New York Dolls. It was a whole vibe that, after the late-90’s doldrums of teenybopper autotune and caveman rap-rock and Nu-Metal, was like a drink of fresh water in the desert. It had nothing to say, it was merely cool, rock with the blues turned down.

They had a second album, Room on Fire, that was more of the same, and a third, First Impressions of Earth, that I thought was a modern masterpiece that everyone ignored because Rock is Dead Now (I had the same problem with The Black & White Album by The Hives. You swine have no ears). Then they went on a brief hiatus. When their Album 4, unfortunately named Angles, came out, I was revolted by the ubiquitous pink-and-blue (you have no idea how obligatory that color scheme was for late-oughties indie-pop) album cover, underwhelmed by the samples, and lost interest. I kept telling myself I’d check back in, but nothing I heard hit like that first cobweb-clearing blast.

But the band is still capable of good work, in fact, they may be more capable, and more relevant, now than when they first kicked off. Back then, they were lumped into a “garage punk”/”The *somethings*” grouping of Rock Revivalism. But anyone with ears could tell the difference between them and The White Stripes or The Hives. And in any case, that movement/moment was over before the decades’ end, replaced by various neo-folk and synthwave varieties, while hip-hop underwent its current radioactive decay, and K-Pop became a thing people knew.

So, past all that noise, The Strokes are finally free to indulge their synth-rock desires, the kind of technical ecstasy that lead singer Julian Casablancas displayed so effectively on his solo album Phrazes For The Young. It carries forward the revelation from Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, that rock can be rock without the guitars leading the way. This is good because evolution of musical styles is the point: without that the tradition is dead. That which lives, grows.