For a moment there Julian Casablancas was pretty clear on why he’d left New York, his childhood home and the place where his band, the Strokes, who were once synonymous with everything raw-edged and seductive about the city, first came of age. "I walk around New York now and get upset," he’d said. Too many juice bars, basically. Too few genuinely cool guys like, well—Julian Casablancas. But a day later he seems to be regretting even that small disclosure. "I wouldn’t say that the reason is I walk around and hate everyone who lives there. That’s just rude." He’d reluctantly told me the name of the town north of the city where he and his wife and son have moved. Now he seems to be reconsidering that, too. "Do you mind if you just call it ’upstate,’ just cuz…"

If you don’t hate everyone in New York, what made you leave?

"Um, we just found a cool place that we liked that we wanted to go, and also… I don’t know.… Sorry.…"

This is the way he talks. Like he’s constantly wondering what Julian Casablancas—whoever that is—might say, or should say. Across the table, through the gloom of the Mexican restaurant we’re sitting in somewhere in Los Angeles, where he’s come to rehearse with his new band, he already seems to be in real pain. We’ve been here for eighteen minutes.

"I’m not doing well all of a sudden, falling off the rails, so confused between what’s private and not.…"

He appears to have slightly more hair on the right side of his head than the left—it’s patchy and long and angelic in that familiar tattered way that is becoming increasingly spooky as he ages. He’s decided not to say much about himself—he’s never really said much about himself; he is infamously mumbly, awkward, sometimes confrontational—but he keeps slipping up.

He is surprisingly good at soccer.

"Do you sport, Zach?" he asks, ball at his feet, the sun setting over a studio parking lot in Burbank, his bandmates milling around. Casablancas, 36, has a new record out in September with these guys, the Voidz—five session musicians turned actual friends who all look like variations on Animal from the Muppets—and they’re practicing it out here in the Valley. This is how we all first meet, forming that universal configuration of bros lazily passing a spherical object back and forth.

Enter the Voidz: (from left) Jeramy Gritter, Jeff Kite (in back), Alex Carapetis, Casablancas, Amir Yaghmai, and Jake Bercovici

The record’s called Tyranny, and that’s sort of what it’s about, Casablancas says: rapacious oil companies and a not-so-free press and environmental depredation. Money. Health care. Nightmares. The moon. "It’s not very sexy to talk about these things, especially in a place like America, where things are, like, the best. But it just feels like we’re inside that Versailles bubble, you know?"