Roundhouse,
London Returning with their first new material since 2013, the band settle into a glorious new wave groove – and a stretch of self-indulgence
A few years back, GQ magazine ran a feature headlined “The fifteen-year decline of the Strokes”, outlining the ways the
New York quintet had disappointed since their 2001 debut album, Is This It. Perhaps that trajectory was inevitable: having achieved pretty much everything they could have hoped with their first statement, where could they have gone? The slight air that being the Strokes has never been strictly necessary to them – they were all born into wealth, and the relative paucity of the live shows and infrequency of albums suggests they don’t need to keep working to keep the heating on – is reinforced by an incident partway through this show.
After a terrific run through You Only Live Once, a song plucked from the place where classic rock bumped up against new wave, Julian Casablancas starts singing something unrecognisable. Albert Hammond Jr joins in on guitar, and gradually the other three try to work out something to do. It doesn’t seem to be a song from the forthcoming new album, The New Abnormal, given that three of the band are barely playing it, but in an example of work-to-rule that would have impressed a 1970s trade unionist, the band count it as one of their 15 songs for the evening, leave the stage one song before the end of the written setlist, and drop The Modern Age from the encore.