The Strokes - The New Abnormal

The Guardian 80

(Cult Records/RCA)
The irascible rockers present a united front again to focus on taut, driven songs with catchy riffs

The Strokes are back, and this time nobody likes them. At least, that’s the impression frontman Julian Casablancas seems keen to impart on the band’s sixth album. “All my friends left, and they don’t miss me,” he moans, like Toby Young for the ageing-hipsters-with-directional-mullets crowd. Elsewhere he’s an “ugly boy”, a bad decision maker who wants “new friends, but they don’t want me / They’re making plans while I watch TV.”

Pitchfork 57

The NYC band’s first album in seven years is sluggish and slight, rendering their signature sound as background music.

The Guardian 0

(Cult Records/Columbia)
Frontman Julian Casablancas is back on passive-aggressive form as the New Yorkers deliver all-out pop and mid-paced fillers on their first album in seven years

What was on the Strokes’ minds when they named their latest album The New Abnormal? It’s anyone’s guess. Part of the appeal of this band has long lain in their inscrutability – especially that of singer Julian Casablancas. It’s in the way he hollers about something so oblique, spittle-flecked and sublime as to be beyond the ken of the average civilian, even as she pores over a lyric sheet.

No one in Camp Stroke, of course, foresaw the atypical, twilit times into which this album would arrive. But The New Abnormal does herald another unexpected state of affairs: one in which this band’s long, slow, painful decline finally levels out a little.

The task here is to taste the fresh fruit being thrown into the bowl of dubious backstage punch

Related: The Strokes on their wilderness years: 'There was conflict and fear and we got through it'