It was fall 2010, and I’d given up on sleep. At night I woke up every couple hours to worry about my job, which combined 70-hour weeks with constant cross-country travel and a boss who regularly talked of jumping ship. When I talked to recruiters about other jobs, I heard cryptic things about how the legal industry didn’t necessarily like African-Americans or women of childbearing age. The jobs I interviewed for promised worse hours, shittier pay, and in one case, the right to visit prison daily to hand incarcerated death row defendants pencils and paper to write letters for prison wardens to ignore during the years-long pendency of their hopeless criminal appeals.
I’d lost large patches of hair and often drifted off into thoughts about how empty I usually felt and the terror I lapsed into after my worst day at work: a 15-hour slog that ended in me jumping a fence to escape a cabbie who, upset that I’d only tipped him 15 percent, sped the wrong way down a one-way street to hunt me down after I left the FedEx where he’d dropped me off. He sat outside the entire time I waited in line to ship papers to a client, screaming while passersby looked on in horror and offered to call the cops. I arrived home safely, learned the next day that no one at work cared that I’d escaped the threat of violence for the job, and officially concluded that I was burnt out.
The National seemed to be singing about a similar enough type of corporate disheartenment in their song “Mistaken for Strangers”: “showered and blue-blazered/fill yourself with quarters,” so I adopted their album Boxer and Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs, a dour exploration of suburban ennui that matched my urban malaise. But sometime that fall I heard the Strokes’ “Soma” in a coffee shop for the first time in years and felt straight-up destroyed by how amazing it sounded. It had the rawness of a live album without the distraction of audience noise. Is This It generally had less of the wall of sound common to grunge and alt-rock, so the guitars and drums came through sharply, like a hammer on a nail. This energetic precision gave the songs a freight train chasing someone down the tracks quality I found perfect for distracting myself from poisonous thoughts. It was tough music, and when I listened to it I felt tougher—ready to fight.
Though 2001, when Is This It came out (15 years ago this weekend), was an odd moment for a rock band to drop a minimalist album into a sea of rap-rock and nu-metal, 2010 felt like an equally bizarre year to listen to the Strokes. Most of the rock left was indie rock that had gone gentle, and R&B or rap ruled most of the cars that drove Manhattan streets. “Empire State of Mind” played everywhere, but it made NYC sound like a deceptively easy place to achieve whatever you wanted and was therefore, from my perspective, unlistenable. Is This It told more accurate stories from an uglier New York where the cops weren’t bright and people were disappointing and it was fair for everyone to wonder what the whole point of everything was, over music that sounded like a tightly regulated punch to the face.
I remembered not feeling an emotional connection to either “Someday” or “Last Nite” when they were released as singles back in 2001, and groaning over the whole are-the-Strokes-here-to-save-rock-or-not debate, as someone who didn’t care about either preserving the superiority of classic rock or protecting myself from the threat of excellent Missy Elliott albums. But the lovely thing about getting into an album long after its hype dies is that it’s just you hanging out with the music, letting it whir through your brain without interference. The Strokes didn’t need to save rock to make me happy with Is This It, they just needed to do what they did: sound great.
“Can’t you see I’m trying/I don’t even like it” from the title track looped through my head during the most obnoxious parts of my workdays, as I wrote angry legal emails to people who furiously replied to them at 6 p.m. on Fridays and ordered food that didn’t have gluten or meat or whatever ingredient I was avoiding that week in a futile attempt to battle burnout by polishing my diet into a fine sheen. “Leave me alone/I’m in control/I’m in control” from “Take It or Leave It” captured my fight to display a flawless alpha female façade on three hours of tortured sleep a night in a job with no future.
I left my job and wrote. My hair started growing back in. Is This It still had all the grittiness I’d loved before, but tons more repeated listenings unearthed the tracks that emitted a sexy disdain: “Alone, Together,” “Barely Legal,” and “The Modern Age,” where the guitar and bass join up in a triumphant three-and-a-half-minute stomp. This was good music to thaw to—to remember that it was possible to have warmer feelings than frustration and anger and emptiness.
The aspects of Is This It that sound forceful have fresh resonance in 2016. It feels right to listen to an album that verges on violence in a year full of it, to let the guitars and bass and drums repeatedly slam their way through my head as solace. Sometimes it seems like each day brings fresh news of people dying and politicians fighting, while on my stereo the Strokes race their way through old songs in a way that fits the abrasiveness of the current moment.
The band played a Governors Ball gig in June that fit this year’s endless appetite for rage, a set full of driving energy that peaked during the eight tracks they performed from Is This It and shocked the audience into a more-or-less constant scream. One of Fabrizio Moretti’s drums had “this machine also kills fascists” scrawled madly across the front. There was something in the way both the guitar and bass crashed and the vocals bled out on those old songs that sounded hot and dangerous, like each track was a half-second away from dropping us into a vat of boiling water.
It’s a classic Strokes fan move to hold Is This It far, far above the band’s other albums: the similar enough but not quite as electrifying Room on Firefrom 2003; the 60 minutes of often confused experimentation—ranging from surf rock to quiet balladry to generic loudness—that is 2006’s First Impressions of Earth; 2011’s Angles, which often descends into a wall of unfocused noise; and 2013’s Comedown Machine, the band’s emotionally detached stab at ’80s synth-pop. The Governors Ball set was, in part, meant to highlight their new EP Future Present Past—three tracks that, much like their last three albums, combine an intriguing futuristic post-punk sound (“Drag Queen”) with a less-inspired imitation of the arrogant minimalist rock they nailed back in 2001 (“Threat of Joy”). Yet they only played two of the three songs on the EP, and when, after a long stretch of tracks from Is This It, Julian Casablancas yelled “new shit” before the band went into “Drag Queen,” we all groaned at the idea of having to hear more of the recent material.
Of course, we didn’t have to fall in love with the new songs to jump and scream and crash into each other’s shoulders when they played the old stuff: a rendition of “The Modern Age” that turned its thumping rhythm into a force so strong it felt like a boot to the chest; a version of “Soma” with a sharp guitar that felt perfectly sour, like a glass of lemonade on a 90-degree day; a ferocious take on “Hard to Explain” that, when combined with piercing white background light, made me feel like I’d been lit on fire. Every time I’m tempted to really lay into the Strokes’ later work, I ask myself how many of us have recorded one great album—the kind of album that can shake people out from a thicket of despondency. I stay quiet and keep “Soma” on repeat.