The Strokes are back, and this time nobody likes them. At least, that’s the impression frontman Julian Casablancas seems keen to impart on the band’s sixth album. “All my friends left, and they don’t miss me,” he moans, like Toby Young for the ageing-hipsters-with-directional-mullets crowd. Elsewhere he’s an “ugly boy”, a bad decision maker who wants “new friends, but they don’t want me / They’re making plans while I watch TV.”
In truth, likability has never been the Strokes’s strong suit – in fact, their rich-kids-of-New-York insouciance, uncooperative interview technique and seemingly seconds-long ascent to an indelible position in the rock’n’roll firmament made them actively unsympathetic figures: where was the suffering, where was the struggle? In later years, this lack of amiability seemed to bleed into the internal workings of the band itself. Their first post-hiatus album, 2011’s Angles, was beleaguered by a splintered recording process; 2013’s Comedown Machine was accompanied by a media blackout partly occasioned by intra-band arguing.
Which makes The New Abnormal the first Strokes album in 14 years that has been fully endorsed by its creators. And, initially at least, it shows. Opening track The Adults Are Talking is dazzling, the spiralling momentum of its chorus offset by guitars about seven ways, from angular rattling to phone-dial chiming to sweetly inquiring riffs that appear to converse with one another. Brooklyn Bridge to Chorus’s droll new wave, with its kazoo-like riffs and sultry spoken word, is amusingly camp and in parts strangely beautiful, while Bad Decisions, which interpolates Dancing With Myself, possesses a gut-punch nostalgia. Throughout, Casablancas’s voice is gratifyingly elastic, swerving between flutey falsetto, dissolute rasp, tremulous yell and pouty sprechgesang.
Yet what begins with taut, engaging pop eventually starts to sag. At the Door’s synth-pop dirge is dreary, while Ode to the Mets provides a decidedly unspectacular finale. It’s the kind of drop-off in quality that suggests old indifference dies hard, but it’s certainly not the whole story: The New Abnormal proves that when they put their minds to it, that old magic is still well within the Strokes’s grasp.
