Fifteen years ago, Julian Casablancas opened the Strokes’ feverishly anticipated second album by declaring, “I wanna be forgotten.” At the time, it seemed like an all-too-knowing response to the band’s sudden fame. But everything Casablancas has done since—from the Strokes’ sporadic and scattered follow-up albums to his increasingly outré solo quests—suggests he wasn’t joking. Casablancas is the natural-born rock star whose essence was defined by his seeming indifference to rock stardom. But his blasé attitude always belied the Strokes’ airtight sense of craftsmanship. His current passion project, as lead singer for the Voidz, is what happens when Casablancas stops just looking like he doesn’t give a fuck and really starts acting like it.

In both look and sound, the Voidz are the Turkish Star Wars version of the Strokes: a proudly low-rent, audacious, bizarro-world transfiguration that’s equally admirable and repellent. And for those Strokes fans who thought the Voidz’s messy 2014 debut, Tyranny (credited to Julian Casablancas+The Voidz), was a one-off blurt that the singer just had to get out of his system, Virtue doubles down on his commitment to obfuscation. For one, Casablancas has taken his name off the marquee, stripping the Voidz of their lead singer’s star billing and whatever expectations may come with it. And while there’s no 11-minute hazing rituals like Tyranny’s progasaurus “Human Sadness” to be found here, Virtue’s hour-long, 15-track run-time still counts as a formidable endurance test, presenting a collage of ’80s ephemera—new wave, electro, hair metal, yacht rock—rendered in the snowy resolution of an overused VHS cassette. But like an old TV that only works when you position the antenna just so, the album’s scrambled signals do occasionally cohere into surprising moments of clarity and radiance.

On their later records, the Strokes sounded hamstrung about how to evolve, and their attempts to draw outside the lines felt forced and unnatural. But Virtue opener “Leave It in My Dreams” plays to Casablancas’ innate strengths while weirding things up in just the right ways: his bleary-eyed melancholy and just-rolled-outta-bed delivery give way to a disarming emotional payoff, as guitarists Amir Yaghmai and Jeramy Gritter spaz out over the song’s breezy strut. “Don’t overthink it,” Casablancas sings en route to the rousing chorus, and Virtue’s best moments emerge when he takes those words to heart. There’s the divine “Lazy Boy,” a gentle jangle-soul reverie upended by a military-drummed chorus, and the neon groove of “All Wordz Are Made Up,” which suggests an alternate ’00s where Casablancas didn’t have to shoulder the weight of saving rock’n’roll and instead disappeared into the Williamsburg electro-party circuit.

Casablancas and co. scatter these sort of pop reprieves across Virtue, wisely deploying them whenever it feels like the album is starting to crumble under the weight of its excesses. This is a record where inspired ideas are constantly battling for oxygen with dubious ones: “One of the Ones” boasts an absolutely sublime guitar break, but you have to trudge through its sluggish grind to unearth it; “Wink” centers around a winsome Afro-pop melody, but the band’s incessant tinkering eventually reduces the song to a puddle. Even the album’s most straight-ahead rockers aren’t immune to the Voidz’s fussy impulses: The robo-metal rager “Black Hole” is neutered by its toilet-bowl production, while the anti-Trump screed “We’re Where We Were” feels less like a political punk song than a caricature of one. And this is to say nothing of Virtue’s questionable detours into nu-metal (“Pyramid of Bones”) and Falco-worthy Eurotrash (“QYURRYUS”).

But if there’s a method to all this madness, it’s revealed amid the sultry soft rock of “Permanent High School,” when Casablancas sings, “Just because something’s popular, don’t mean it’s good.” It’s a line that effectively serves as a hyperlink to that already-infamous Vulture interview, where Casablancas sounds off on injustices both real (the corrosive effects of corporations on democracy, the scourge of Fake News) and imagined (the perceived commercial failures of Jimi Hendrix and David Bowie), while castigating Top 40 pop music as a symptom of both. That disillusionment is laid bare on the mid-album acoustic respite “Think Before You Drink,” a melodramatic, Dylan-esque rendition of a ’70s-pop obscurity that reflects his great awokening. But Casablancas’ most potent protest against the powers that be is to simply be the change he wants to see in the world: Virtue imagines the sound of rock music in an upside-down universe where, as he fantasized to Vulture, Ariel Pink does sell more records than Ed Sheeran. And its response to the insidious evils of the internet is to mash-up and mutate oppositional styles in the same way your brain is forced to funnel serious CNN headlines and stupid memes into the same neural data stream. On Virtue, the murkiness is the message—the obtuse agitprop of an anti-star who still wants to be forgotten.