What would a rock band have to do now to be seen as heralding the future? Twenty years ago, it was enough to be in possession of sharp cheekbones, tight jeans and 11 fantastic songs.
The first album by the Strokes, Is This It, was released 20 years ago this month. It spread around the world in a way that would be impossible now. Only Australia got the album in July 2001. The UK release was not for another month, to tie in with the Reading and Leeds festivals. The US vinyl version was released on 11 September, but the CD edition was held back, so they could remove the song ‘New York City Cops’, whose refrain of ‘they ain’t too smart’ didn’t itself seem too smart in the wake of 9/11.
It’s unnerving to try to think of guitar bands who genuinely sound like nothing that has come before
If the manner of release now seems alien, so does the way Is This It was received. ‘Is this really it?’ wondered NME. ‘Oh, it is. If “it” is 11 songs and 37 minutes of concise and elegant rock music by five young men. If “it” is a truly great statement of intent, one of the all-too-infrequent calls to arms that guitar music can provide, one of the best and most characterful debut albums of the last 20 years.’ Even a decade later, in a tenth anniversary piece, Slate was calling it ‘a decade-defining record that set the agenda for how rock sounded and even looked throughout the aughts… nothing less than an 11-song fireball’.
The emergence of the Strokes came at a time when guitar bands seemed to embody all that was desirable in popular culture, and they were on the breaking crest of a wave. Alongside them in New York in the early years of the century were Interpol, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Rapture; in the midwest there were the White Stripes, the Von Bondies, the Black Keys.
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