The Strokes - The New Abnormal - 7/10

The news of a new Strokes record is met with a muted excitement nowadays. The band assumed the status of legendary after releasing two of the best records of the new century – 2001’s ‘Is This It’ and 2003’s ‘Room on Fire’ – and have struggled with the pressure of living up to the expectation ever since. ‘The New Abnormal’ follows a series of underwhelming releases with significant waits in between and expectations around this new record have been measured as a result.

It’s good news then that ‘The New Abnormal’ does not suffer from some of the same problems that weighed down its predecessors and finds the band sounding rejuvenated and possibly even having fun.

The record kicks off with ‘The Adults are Talking’ which, if you stripped away the excess, sounds like it could have fitted in comfortably on ‘Is This It’. It’s a strong opener to the album and gets catchier each time you hear it. Recent single ‘Bad Decisions’ is destined to be a future festival sing-along and take away the vocals from ‘Brooklyn Bridge to Chorus’ and it sounds like the soundtrack to a Sega Megadrive game from the early nineties – that shouldn’t be cool but for a child of the nineties it really is!

Not that every song on the collection has the same strut and confidence. The rasp of Julian Casablancas’ vocal on ‘Eternal Summer’ is a strong moment but ultimately the song limps on without ever really finding its feet. Similarly first single ‘At the Door’ runs out of steam before ever truly affecting the listener.

What made the Strokes such a huge band nearly twenty years ago was their ability to craft songs so catchy and urgent that they’ve never aged and that is the problem with this record – it lacks songs that stay with you for days and demand you sing-along. It doesn’t suffer from filler (like 2011’s ‘Angles’) or lack identity (like 2013’s muddled ‘Comedown Machine’) and it definitely showcases the band’s signature sound. It just rarely gets the listener excited.

This is not a record that will grab you immediately and do not expect to fall in love on first listen. It is a record to play on repeat and discover the moments of magic. Whether it’s the synth at the start of pretty album closer ‘Ode to the Mets’ that sounds exactly like Casablanca’s’ vocal, when he calls in Fabio Morretti on drums on the same track, or the tender moments of ‘Not the Same Anymore. They are there to be found.

Whilst there are hints of the band that set the world alight in 2001, ‘The New Abnormal’ is not the new ‘Is This It’. Neither, however, is it the sound of a death knell for a band that should have hung up their guitars whilst the going was good. This is, I hope, not the sound of the end of the road but instead the sound of a brighter future.