Like most people who listen to rock music in their mid-30s, I remember exactly where I was the first time I heard the Strokes. It was sometime in the late summer of 2001, and I was maybe two weeks into my sophomore year of high school in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. I was working on the family computer in our living room, with MTV2 on the background, when after a System of a Down video, the video for “Last Nite” started, and without putting too fine a point on it, I know that after that I no longer wore JNCOs and was concerned with the interplay between rhythm and lead guitar riffs in a way I definitely wasn’t beforehand. Which is to say, I’ve owned five copies of Is This It in multiple media formats.

The first time I heard The New Abnormal, the sixth LP from the Strokes, I was in the basement of my house in St. Paul, Minnesota, on my 28th day of social distancing, anxiously refreshing my Instacart order, wondering if the HyVee would have the brand of chicken strips that I like, endlessly grateful for the people who are able to make that convenience possible, especially since my immunosuppressed wife would risk life for us to try to score those strips on our own. “We can’t help it if we are the problem,” Julian Casablancas croons into my ears, as I pull down to refresh the app, watching Johnathan check out. They didn’t have the strips.

This sixth Strokes album, produced by Rick Rubin, credited to the Strokes in the songwriting for the first time ever, was almost certainly titled months ago, its release date chosen and its singles pegged, long before points around all of this. But the Strokes might be more born in this, molded by it, than any band of their cohort; they were, after all, uncomfortable and dissatisfied from the first line on the first song on their first album (the poet bard Casablancas: “Can’t you see I’m trying, I don’t even like it”). The New Abnormal is a grumpy, down-in-the-dumps album that crackles with the life that was oft-missing on the last two Strokes LPs at least, an album where the best song (“At The Door”) doesn’t even have any drums. A nostalgia trip this is not; the Strokes have been beating against the currents of their own past since at least 2002, when they hired Nigel Godrich to turn them into Radiohead, for fear that they were going to make Is This It a second time. They’ve been avoiding “returning to form” for as long as they’ve been a band, more or less, so The New Abnormal is instead a conscious relaunch of the Strokes as a concern, their best album since 2006, and one of this year’s most (only?) thought-provoking big-budget rock album.