About
When they hit the New York scene at the turn of the millennium, the scruffy, hip, Seventies-inflected Strokes seemed to embody the very nature of downtown cool despite the fact that most of the band had grown up uptown. The son of modeling agent John Casablancas, Julian Casablancas was sent at 14 to Le Rosey, a Swiss boarding school, where he began playing music with another scion of the well-known, Albert Hammond Jr. (whose namesake father had a number of early-Seventies hits such as "It Never Rains in Southern California"). Casablancas had already played in Manhattan, his hometown, with guitarist Nick Valensi and drummer Fabrizio Moretti; he'd also been a friend of future bassist Nikolai Fraiture. When Hammond moved to New York (he'd enrolled at NYU), he hooked up with Casablancas and the three others and started playing bars in the borough's Lower East Side in 1999. Ryan Gentles, the booker for small New York club the Mercury Lounge, quit his job to become the group's manager.
With a sound that evoked the flat rumble of late-Seventies New York rock but whose chewy tunes were rooted in the new wave candy of the Cars, the Strokes' appeal was immediate; they became the most popular club band in New York and when they issued their first EP, The Modern Age (2001), they became a press-fueled sensation in England, where their debut album, Is This It (Number 33, 2001), was released before America got it, with a slightly different album cover and track listing ("New York City Cops" — "they ain't too smart," Casablancas yowled — was deemed potentially offensive in the wake of 9/11 and was replaced by "When It Started"). Tight, lean, smart and almost subliminally catchy, It became one of the most acclaimed albums of its era, finishing second in the Village Voice's annual critics poll and setting a number of younger bands off in emulating their wiry sound.
The Strokes were lumped into the 2001-02 "rock is back" brigade — were often said to lead it, in fact — but they were such a sensation (in press terms, not in mass numbers) that they seemed stuck in a rut. Their second full-length album, 2003's Room on Fire (Number Four) offered a more polished version of the Is This It template. Originally the Strokes were going to make their follow-up with producer Nigel Godrich (Radiohead), but instead went back to the debut's decksman, Gordon Raphael. It was around this time that Moretti's relationship with movie star Drew Barrymore came to light, earning the band extra, if not quite welcome, press. In 2005, Casablancas married the band's assistant manager; the following year, Valensi wed photographer Amanda de Cadenet.
For First Impressions of Earth (Number Four, 2006), they expanded their sonic palette, at times almost willfully, casting some doubt as to their direction. Later in 2006, Hammond Jr. released his debut, Yours to Keep, in the U.K.; it saw U.S. issue a year later and his second solo album, ¿Cómo Te Llama? was released in July 2008, shortly after Casablancas' single with Pharrell and Santogold promoting Converse dropped. In June 2008, a message on the Strokes' official Website announced the band would get back to making new music together in early 2009.
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