T he world is terrible and all hope is lost but then The Strokes announce a new album and suddenly things feel that little bit more bearable. This will have been the response from rock fans of a certain age to news that the New Yorkers will shortly swing back into action with a long-awaited sixth LP, The New Abnormal.

Before that, there will be a smattering of preview gigs, starting tonight with a show at the Roundhouse in north London. The louchest and occasionally coolest band on the planet are about to re-enter the pop wars. Even if you haven’t slapped on one of their records in years you will agree this can only be a good thing. Life with The Strokes is better than life without.

Such excitement is largely testament to the hum of nostalgia that has accumulated around Strokes’ 2001 debut, Is This It. It is an album that evokes a panoply of feelings, many of them bittersweet. From the vantage point of 2020, an LP supposed to mark the beginning of a beautiful career for The Strokes now feels like the end of something.

Is This It was one of the last albums that documented a place and time: geographically, sonically, and culturally tusoo. It is a capsule from a long-ago era when rock’n’roll mattered. That no record since has arguably captured the imagination in a similar fashion has more to do with shifts in popular culture than with The Strokes themselves. Bedraggled indie rock no longer has the power to commandeer the zeitgeist.

The 35 best debut albums of all time Show all 35 1 /35 The 35 best debut albums of all time The 35 best debut albums of all time 35) Arctic Monkeys – Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not (2006) A new wave of British guitar bands was already being pioneered by the likes of The Libertines, Bloc Party and Franz Ferdinand when the Sheffield-formed Arctic Monkeys arrived on the scene. But their 2006 debut – the defiantly titled Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not – is arguably the most generation-defining, by a band experiencing the kind of hype that hadn’t been seen since Oasis with Definitely Maybe. Alex Turner’s sardonic and keenly observational lyrics on songs like “Fake Tales of San Francisco” and “When the Sun Goes Down” had fans clamouring to get into their early shows. It was an early example of the power the internet would hold over the music industry – propelling them from an unknown indie band on MySpace to the top of the charts in the space of six months. The 35 best debut albums of all time 34) Please Please Me – The Beatles (1963) Please Please Me has a rhythm to it like little else released by The Beatles. Songs like “Twist and Shout” and “I Saw Her Standing There” have an energy that reflects the youthful vim of the band themselves, who were raring to go following the number one single from which the album takes its name. Their harmonies are thrilling to hear, and this is arguably the best album for capturing the band’s raw power. The 35 best debut albums of all time 33) Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Fever to Tell (2003) In 2003, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs stuck a middle finger up to the naysayers who scoffed that they were little more than a bunch of posers. Their debut album Fever to Tell is a bristling record loaded with New York snark supplied by Karen O’s impressive vocal turns. Nick Zinner keeps the urgency going with roaring guitar licks while Brian Chase offers earth-shaking percussion on the likes of “Date With the Night” and “Y Control”. More than trendsetters – the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were the brains behind the smartest album of that year. The 35 best debut albums of all time 32) Franz Ferdinand – Franz Ferdinand (2004) Kanye West called it “white crunk music”. The band themselves called it “music for girls to dance to”. And songs such as “This Fire” certainly livened things up their irresistible hooks and disco energy, as frontman Alex Kapranos turned the male gaze on its head with lyrics like “I can feel your lips undress my eyes”. Fifteeen years later and “Take Me Out” still makes you swing your hips. The 35 best debut albums of all time 31) Oasis – Definitely Maybe (1994) Blur versus Oasis is a battle music fans will be waging for decades to come, but when it comes to debut albums, Oasis emerge as top dogs. Definitely Maybe was exciting, aggressive and loaded with attitude: a 22-year-old Liam Gallagher spits and snarls over the reverb-soaked guitars of “Cigarettes & Alcohol”, and soars on that falsetto for “Live Forever”. Among the “too cool for school” alt-rockers who spurned the glitz and glamour of fame, Oasis asserted themselves as the definitive rock and roll stars. The 35 best debut albums of all time 30) Lady Gaga – The Fame (2008) Stefani Germanotta’s debut album The Fame brought maximalist pop back to the forefront of the late-Noughties music scene, in an industry that was desperately lacking in pop divas. Lady Gaga already sounded famous and she acted famous – but that doesn’t mean her music couldn’t stand on its own. Songs like “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich” and “Just Dance” seemed to convey Gaga’s love of fame and hedonism while remaining supremely self-aware of its superficiality. To top it off, it was masterfully produced and resplendent with slick, catchy dancepop and Eurodisco influences. The 35 best debut albums of all time 29) Kendrick Lamar – good kid, m.A.A.d City (2012) Kendrick Lamar subtitled his debut record “A Short Film by Kendrick Lamar”, and indeed it feels as though you’re watching the movie of his early life – such is the autobiographical nature of this record. He raps in low, furtive tones, interrupted by voicemails from his family (his mother asks him pleadingly to return her car) that reinforce the familial themes. It is family, and faith, that keep Lamar on the outskirts of a world of violence and sin. Even this early on his career you hear the virtuosity and acute understanding of rhythm – Good kid, m.A.A.d City now stands as a classic album from a rapper who chooses the power of storytelling over a cheap punchline. The 35 best debut albums of all time 28) Led Zeppelin – Led Zeppelin (1969) Not every great debut album is defined by whether the artist has landed on their “sound” by the first track. Led Zeppelin were still figuring things out when they released their self-titled debut, yet it is essential because it laid the groundwork for what they would go onto achieve the following decade. “We were learning what got us off most and what got people off most,” Robert Plant said. You had the blues and folk notes on “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You”, and the chugging rock of “Communication Breakdown”; Plant’s yowling vocals and Jimmy Page’s guitar. It did the trick. The 35 best debut albums of all time 27) The Jesus and Mary Chain – Psychocandy (1985) “It was the crap coming out of the radio that made us want to be in a band more than anything else,” Jim Reid told Rolling Stone for the 30th anniversary of the Scottish alt-rocker’s debut album Psychocandy. “Because it was like, ‘Why is everything we hear so f***ing awful?’ That was the main driving force: how bad things were.” Psychocandy was certainly like nothing anyone else released at that time. Inspired by the Velvet Underground and The Stooges, the Reid brothers loaded their debut with buzzy guitars and hair-raising levels of feedback on singles like “You Trip Me Up” and “Never Understand”. It paved the way for countless shoegaze and alt-rock bands in the decades that followed. The 35 best debut albums of all time 26) Jeff Buckley – Grace (1994) Grace is a masterpiece, and the only album the perfectionist Jeff Buckley was satisfied with before he drowned, aged 30, in a freak accident in Memphis in 1997. Yet had Grace been the only material ever released under his name (live recordings, covers and demos were released posthumously), it would have been enough to prove he was a rare and exceptional talent. His exquisite rendering of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”, his melismatic singing on “Grace” and the church-like hush of “Lover, You Should Come Over” – all of this and more carved out a rich legacy that ensures Buckley’s music will never fade. The 35 best debut albums of all time 25) Eminem – The Slim Shady LP (1999) The whipsmart, cynical, outrageous young man on Eminem’s major label debut was a breath of fresh air – or perhaps more of a slap in the face – after a spate of soulful, conscious hip hop records. Of course, the rampant misogyny and homophobia his so-called “character” Slim Shady spat out caused uproar, regardless of how surreal the scenarios to which they were applied were. Arguably what stands out the most on The Slim Shady LP is the sheer technical skill and lyrical ability that few have been able to match since. The 35 best debut albums of all time 24) The Who – My Generation (1965) Not only did it lay the groundwork for so many punk, rock and heavy metal bands that came after them – but the manic rhythms and raw intensity of their power-chord ballads featured on The Who's my Generation propelled rock and roll to new heights in 1965. The 35 best debut albums of all time 23) The Strokes – Is This It (2001) “Saviours of rock and roll!” “The greatest rock band since the Rolling Stones!” You have to pity The Strokes, who released their debut album under the biggest wave of hype imaginable. Yet it’s hard to deny the impact Is This It had on rock music – critics have argued that the Arctic Monkeys and Franz Ferdinand wouldn’t have existed if not for this band. They eschewed pre-programmed beats and autotuned vocals in favour of a gritty post-punk approach, and the result was an album that reinvigorated a floundering music industry, and inspired an entire generation of bands. The 35 best debut albums of all time 22) Run-DMC – Run-DMC (1984) The idea of a rap album was virtually inconceivable until Run-DMC released their full-length, self-titled debut in 1984. When he inducted them into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Eminem called them “the first movie stars of rap… they are The Beatles”. Busta Rhymes proclaimed: “Run-DMC didn’t change music, they changed everything.” The trio’s aggressive yet stark tracks – like “Sucker MCS” and “Hard Times” – were a dramatic contrast against the R&B-driven rap of the time, an approach emulated by the rappers themselves, who spurned outlandish costumes in favour of tracksuits and sneakers. As an anniversary piece in Billboard noted, “they were authentic before authenticity in hip hop was even a thing”. The 35 best debut albums of all time 21) Roxy Music – Roxy Music (1972) Brian Eno’s experimental synths met Bryan Ferry’s romantic, old-school charm on the debut album from Roxy Music's bizarre art-glam-rock outfit. There were odes to Humphrey Bogart (“2HB”) and cyber-rock jams (“Ladytron”), and songs decorated with spooky-sounding hooks that wouldn’t sound out of place in The Rocky Horror Show (the character Riff Raff even seemed to take his cues from a balding Brian Eno). The 35 best debut albums of all time 20) Jay-Z – Reasonable Doubt (1996) Still regarded by many as his greatest album to date, Reasonable Doubt asserted Jay-Z as a master freestyle – perhaps the best of his generation – recorded in a studio he compared to a psychiatrist’s couch. At the heart of the record is a blistering duet with the Notorious BIG, “Brooklyn’s Finest”, which practically heralded the shift of focus back from West Coast hip hop to the East. The 35 best debut albums of all time 19) Black Sabbath – Black Sabbath (1970) Rolling Stone's Lester Bangs described the Black Sabbath as “just like Cream! But worse”, and their debut album as “a shuck – despite the murky song titles and some inane lyrics that sound like Vanilla Fudge paying doggerel tribute to Aleister Crowley, the album has nothing to do with spiritualism, the occult, or anything much except stiff recitations of Cream clichés”. The Village Voice weren’t keen either, with critic Robert Christgau condemning it as “bulls**t necromancy.” Yet this is the album that invented heavy metal. Black Sabbath arrived ready to lure fans over to the dark side with Ozzy Osbourne’s piercing, operatic cry: “My name is Lucifer, please take my hand.” Critics be damned. The 35 best debut albums of all time 18) Sex Pistols – Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols (1977) “The album will last. The sleeve may not,” said the adverts for the Sex Pistols’ first and only studio album in 1977. The Sex Pistols were already controversial before the release of Never Mind the Bollocks, having caused nationwide uproar for swearing on live TV, been fired from two record labels, and been banned from a number of live venues in England. Yet despite many major retailers refusing to sell it, the album debuted at number one on the UK album charts and is today regarded as one of the most important punk albums in music history. The 35 best debut albums of all time 17) The Clash – The Clash (1977) Joe Strummer was a ball of rage and ambition when he and the rest of The Clash laid down the tracks for their debut album. Most of the guitar on this record was provided by Mick Jones, because Strummer didn’t think technical ability was punk enough. Yet their vision burns through on the buzz-saw attack of “Career Opportunities” and “White Riot”, raising a fist against unemployment, racism and the fat cats of industry. The 35 best debut albums of all time 16) Guns N Roses – Appetite for Destruction (1987) Guns N Roses' Appetite for Destruction was the biggest thing to happen to hard rock since Led Zeppelin IV. Slash’s guitar and Axl Rose’s wild, animal howls contribute to the raw energy on songs like “Paradise City” and marked a dramatic shift away from the commercialised heavy rock that was being played on MTV at the time – proudly championing a gritty form of hedonism instead. “A lot of rock bands are too f***ing wimpy to have any sentiment or emotion,” Rose said. Not this band. The 35 best debut albums of all time 15) Daft Punk – Homework (1996) Daft Punk's Homework was originally intended as “just a load of singles”, until Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo realised they had enough quality tracks for a full-length release. Each one opens with a kind of motif upon which multiple textures build and sprawl outwards – sleazy guitar hooks, G-funk whines and glittering synths. It’s the album that alerted the rest of the world to the French house music scene. The 35 best debut albums of all time 14) The Doors – The Doors (1967) Sex and poetry go hand in hand, especially if you’re a Jim Morrison fan. While few bands manage to divide critical opinion as much as The Doors, their debut album’s organ-driven rock was as tight as their frontman’s famous leather trousers. They brought theatricality to the Sixties music scene and went onto inspire as broad a range of artists as The Stranglers to Skrillex. The baroque pop stylings and lustful lyrics on “Light My Fire” proved to be a breakthrough, and helped propel them to number two on the US Billboard 200. The 35 best debut albums of all time 13) Kanye West – The College Dropout (2004) After making a name for himself on Jay-Z’s The Blueprint as well as by producing hits for Janet Jackson and Ludacris, Kanye West spent four years recording The College Dropout. His background as a producer was obviously beneficial to his own debut, at a time where hip hop sampling was being accused of being too safe. And he subverted many other hip hop clichés, skirting round the dominant “gangsta” persona and instead finding solace in family and the church. Def Jam The 35 best debut albums of all time 12) Pink Floyd – The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967) Pink Floyd’s debut The Piper at the Gates of Dawn stands as a classic of psychedelic rock. Helmed by an unravelling Syd Barrett – ousted a year after the album’s release – it shows the band at their most playful, with several tracks going onto become staples of their live shows. Songs such as “Bike”, meanwhile, proved the band were not averse to a good pop hook along with the acid guitars and hazy production. The 35 best debut albums of all time 11) Lauryn Hill – The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998) Lauryn Hill raised the game for an entire genre with the immense and groundbreaking record, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Flipping between two tones – sharp and cold, and sensual and smoky – the former Fugees member stepped out from rap’s misogynist status quo and drew an audience outside of hip hop thanks to her melding of soul, reggae and R&B, and the recruitment of the likes of Mary J Blige and D’Angelo. Its sonic appeal has a lot to do with the lo-fi production and warm instrumentation, often comprised of a low thrumming bass, tight snares and doo-wop harmonies. But Hill’s reggae influences are what drive the album’s spirit: preaching love and peace but also speaking out against unrighteous oppression. Even today, it’s one of the most uplifting and inspiring records around. The 35 best debut albums of all time 10) Dizzee Rascal – Boy in Da Corner (2003) It’s staggering to listen back to Boy in Da Corner and remember Dizzee Rascal was just 18-years-old when he released it. Rising through the UK garage scene as a member of east London’s Roll Deep crew, the MC born Dylan Mills allegedly honed his skills in production after being excluded from every one of his classes, apart from music. If you want any sense of how ahead of the game Dizzee was, just listen to the opening track “Sittin’ Here”. While 2018 has suffered a spate of half-hearted singles playing on the listener’s sense of nostalgia for simpler times, 15 years ago Dizzee longed for the innocence of childhood because of what he was seeing in the present day: teenage pregnancies, police brutality, his friends murdered on the streets or lost to a lifestyle of crime and cash. Boy in da Corner goes heavy on cold, uncomfortably disjointed beats, synths that emulate arcade games and police sirens, and Dizzee himself delivering bars in his trademark, high-pitched squawk. The 35 best debut albums of all time 9) Beastie Boys – Licensed to Ill (1986) Hip hop’s first number one album was an incendiary, all-guns-blazing record that would send shockwaves around the music industry for years to come. Few artists release something so assertive as this – a statement of intent to middle America that demanded they fight for their right to party. Beastie Boys' Mike D, Ad-Rock and MCA would move on from the frat boy humour and “good time” attitude of Licensed to Ill, but it is that record that delivered rap against a backdrop of Led Zeppelin and James Brown-inspired guitar licks. The 35 best debut albums of all time 8) The Notorious BIG – Ready to Die (1994) The rapper Notorious BIG, born Christopher Wallace, had been taking part in rap battles around Fulton Street, Brooklyn since he was 13 years old, but it was only at the urging of his friends that he quit a lucrative drugs operation and devoted himself to music. Living on a knife’s edge was all Biggie Smalls knew as a kid, when he was “waking up every morning, hustling, cutting school, looking out for my moms, the police, stickup kids; just risking my life every day on the street selling drugs”, as he told Rolling Stone back in 1995. The things he witnessed and experienced were poured into Ready to Die – one of the best debut albums in hip hop – delivered in his signature throaty vocals with wit and humour. The 35 best debut albums of all time 7) Ramones – Ramones (1976) At less than 30 minutes, Ramones’ debut injects their rage, their disillusionment and their frustration directly into the listener’s veins. It’s a record that spurned the posturing of Seventies rock and stripped all of the artifice away to the bare bones beneath, with songs such as “Beat on the Brat” and “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue” proving to be as surly as the band themselves. “Our early songs came out of our real feelings of alienation, isolation, frustration – the feelings everybody feels between seventeen and seventy-five,” singer Joey Ramone said. The whole record cost just $6,000 to make. The 35 best debut albums of all time 6) NWA – Straight Outta Compton NWA unveiled their cold, menacing sound on debut record Straight Outta Compton that heralded the beginning of gangsta rap and also launched the careers of Dr Dre, Eazy-E and Ice Cube. The latter made it clear they weren’t positioning themselves as people to look up to: “Do I look like a mother***ing role mode?” he demands on “Gangsta Gangsta”. Their track “F*** tha Police” – a protest track against racism and police brutality – led to them receiving a threatening letter from the FBI, which only contributed to their growing fame. The 35 best debut albums of all time 5) The Velvet Underground – The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967) Dubbed the Banana Album for its famous Andy Warhol cover art, The Velvet Underground & Nico is proof of what a band can do when they are completely fearless. With Nico – the beautiful German vocalist added to the band at Warhol’s request – you have this exquisite balance of cool femininity and fiery machismo. Sex and hedonism are everywhere on this record, from “Venus in Furs” to “Run Run Run”, but it’s not so much glamour as glam rock – gritty tales of drug addiction and raw desire. Speaking of its initially low sales figures, Brian Eno observed that, nonetheless, “everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band”. David Bowie called it “the future of music”, and 52 years later, it still feels like it. The 35 best debut albums of all time 4) Jimi Hendrix Experience – Are You Experienced A virtual unknown to rock fans just a year before – Jimi Hendrix used Are You Experienced to assert himself as a guitar genius who could combine pop, blues, rock, R&B, funk and psychedelia in a way no other artist had before. That’s even without the essential contributions of drummer Mitch Mitchell and bassist Noel Redding, who handed Are You Experienced the rhythmic bridge between jazz and rock. Few album openers are as exquisite as “Purple Haze”. Few tracks are as gratifying, as sexy, as the strut on “Foxy Lady”. And few songs come close to the existential bliss caused by “The Wind Cries Mary”. Hendrix’s attack on the guitar contrasted against the more polished virtuosos in rock at the time – yet it is his raw ferocity that we find ourselves coming back to. Few debuts have changed the course of rock music as Hendrix did with his. The 35 best debut albums of all time 3) Patti Smith – Horses (1975) “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine,” go the immortal opening words of Patti Smith’s debut album Horses. There’s a heady anticipation as she speaks the lyric in a low, seductive murmur, before switching to a cocky swagger as the electric guitar line kicks in. It was a bold move, to open her debut album with a reinvention of someone else’s song (in this case Van Morrison’s “Gloria”), but Smith was unlike anything the music world had ever seen. She was a poet, who wanted to capture the literary genius of her idol Arthur Rimbaud and channel it via the raw passion of an artist like Jimi Hendrix. “She was like a wildcat, walking out with this jacket slung over her shoulder,” Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore once recalled of seeing her perform the album live in 1976. “It was life-changing.” The 35 best debut albums of all time 2) Illmatic – Nas (1994) How good can rap get? This good. There are albums where the myth can transcend the music; not on Illmatic, where Nas vaulted himself into the ranks of the greatest MCs in 1994, with an album that countless artists since have tried – and failed – to emulate. Enlisting the hottest producers around – Pete Rock, DJ Premier, Q-Tip, L.E.S and Large Professor – was a move that Complex blamed for “ruining hip hop”, while still praising Nas’s record, because it had a lasting impact on the use of multiple producers on rap albums. Nas used the sounds of the densley-populated New York streets he grew up on. You hear the rattle of the steel train that opens the record, along with the cassette tape hissing the verse from a teenage Nasty Nas on Main Source’s 1991 track “Live at the BBQ”: ‘When I was 12, I went to Hell for snuffing Jesus.” The 35 best debut albums of all time 1) Joy Division – Unknown Pleasures (1979) Unknown Pleasures is unlike any album that had been created before it – or indeed any album since. It’s mysteriousness makes it as compelling as many great works of literature; indeed, our critic Chris Harvey said the spiritual force emanating from the Joy Division's record's grooves make it feel “almost Dostoevskyan”. Peter Hook’s basslines veer and thrum wildly beneath Ian Curtis’s dark mutterings that are at once urgent, detached, and strangely sexless. On “She’s Lost Control” it as though you’re hearing the band play from the end of a dark tunnel – the echoes of Curtis's voice and the ominous rumblings of that bass build and build. By the time you reach those final, shivery notes on “I Remember Nothing”, it doesn’t feel like an overstatement to call this a life-changing record.

Nonetheless, when pop historians come to document the rise and fall of The Strokes it is clear that Julian Casablancas and company are not entirely blameless. As fans look forward to The New Abnormal, they will hope that it captures the naive abandon of Is This It. They will also hope that it is as far removed as possible from The Strokes’ surly, bloated and sharp-elbowed third LP, First Impressions of Earth.

The Strokes’ career is divided down the middle. There is before First Impressions of Earth, released in January 2006. And there is after. It isn’t that the album is terrible – though, really, it isn’t great. It’s just that with it, the dream of The Strokes seemed to die. Afterwards, they would be one of those bands from whom we want only the hits, never the new stuff. They had in five years gone from the future of rock to The Rolling Stones for millennials.

The Strokes were always a soap opera, it is true. It’s just that early on it was Hollyoaks: youthful, vivacious, optimistic. By First Impressions Of Earth, it had devolved to an EastEnders double bill on a dreary Tuesday.

Drugs notoriously played their part. One of the most tragically farcical stories related in Meet Me in the Bathroom, Lizzy Goodman’s oral history of the early Noughties New York rock scene, concerns Strokes guitarist Albert Hammond Jr, bad-boy rocker Ryan Adams and free-wheeling substance abuse.

As Hammond Jr was sucked into Adams’s party monster lifestyle, the rest of The Strokes became understandably and increasingly alarmed. And so they ambushed Adams at a bar and told him to back off. Casablancas, the group’s charismatic frontman and the son of fashion mogul John Casablancas, even threatened to beat up Hammond Jr’s new bestie.

Adams had a different take, feeling he was being scapegoated for instabilities within the band. “It was easy to brand me as the problem,” he told Goodman in her 2017 book. “I would suspect that they soon learned that I was not the problem.”

Hammond Jr would eventually clean up. But the rot had arguably already set in when, in January 2005, The Strokes retreated to Allaire Studios in upstate New York to start on their third LP. The nagging issue was a perceived lack of commercial success. The Strokes were adored. But, out in the real world, they were only almost famous.

It is slightly deflating to learn that the hippest band on the planet would have happily traded some of that cachet for a little more chart success. Yet The Strokes couldn’t help but notice that, in ringing tills if not in kudos, they had been overtaken by a generation of younger artists. Modest sales for their 2003 second album, Room on Fire, had confirmed their status as a big underground act. Commercially, their peers were Interpol and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

That, however, isn’t where The Strokes wanted to be. In 2005, it seemed you couldn’t turn on the radio without hearing “Mr Brightside” by The Killers or something loud and raucous from Kings of Leon. Why were those groups burning it up when The Strokes remained mired in the indie ghetto?

Their conclusion was that it all came down to their sound, which they deemed too lo-fi, too tinny. “It sucks when you’re supposedly this almost mainstream band and [influential LA radio station] KROQ is playing you and and you’re really excited,” guitarist Nick Valensi told Spin magazine in 2006.

“Then Foo Fighters come on and they sound massive. And we sound tiny. There were many conversations along the lines of ‘I think our songs are better than ‘Mr Brightside’. But how come that’s the one everybody’s listening to?’”

The Strokes in 2006, from left: Nikolai Fraiture, Nick Valensi, Fabrizio Moretti, Julian Casablancas and Albert Hammon Jr (Getty)

The focus of their dissatisfaction was long-time-producer Gordon Raphael. He had worked with them on Is This It and Room on Fire. Today, the latter is seen as a classic almost on a par with their debut. At the time, though, it was perceived as a failure. Critics were lukewarm; it didn’t do well outside the always-adoring UK with sales 50 per cent down on Is This It.

Were this just another indie band, it wouldn’t have mattered. The Strokes, though, had famously signed a five album deal with RCA. The Nineties weren’t as far away as all that and “selling out” was a moral choice with which groups were still expected to wrestle (before invariably putting their signatures on the bottom line). So there was a degree of glee in certain quarters that, just two records in, The Strokes were already on a downward trajectory.

Casablancas felt the sting acutely. And so he made what has always been the ultimate fatal error for musicians. He listened to the critics.

“I thought it was bigger and better,” he said of Room on Fire. “But everyone was like, ‘it’s the same thing’. The next album, he vowed, would be different. Radically so.

Their first step was to look around for the biggest producer of the day. They alighted upon Radiohead collaborator Nigel Godrich. He was at that time a bit of a gun for hire, having worked with Travis, The Divine Comedy and Beck. Alas, his clinical technique wasn’t a good fit for The Strokes. “Nigel made it sound clean,” said Casablancas. “But it was soulless”.

15 bands you should listen to in 2020 Show all 15 1 /15 15 bands you should listen to in 2020 15 bands you should listen to in 2020 Odd Morris Established in 2017, Odd Morris are swelling the ranks of Ireland’s rapidly expanding post-punk scene with their own, grunge-influenced take on the abrasive sound. Pummelling drums and strong vocals are found alongside a certain nonchalance; a pleasing sight in a group so young. 15 bands you should listen to in 2020 Porridge Radio This London/Brighton four-piece deal in thunderous guitar riffs and sardonic lyrics. Lead singer, guitarist and songwriter Dana Margolin has a Karen O snarl, especially on grunge-influenced tracks such as 'Sweet' – we're hoping for an album in 2020. 15 bands you should listen to in 2020 Fontaines DC Another brazen post-punk band that’s bursting out of Dublin, Fontaines DC’s lyrical impressionism is a gritty response to their discordant political surroundings. Debut album Dogrel, which was shortlisted for the Mercury prize, celebrated Ireland’s proud literary and cultural heritage and landed a spot on The Independent’s albums of the year (2019). 15 bands you should listen to in 2020 The Orielles The Orielles fuse aspects of dream-pop and psychedelia to create pop songs that sound as though they’ve been sent to the stratosphere and back. Ethereal, hook-laden vocals from Esmé Dee Hand-Halford ricochet around their recordings among a whirl of reverb-drenched instrumentation. 15 bands you should listen to in 2020 UGLY UGLY are proving themselves as adept exponents of the eerie jazz-punk fusion that King Krule pioneered half a decade ago. Made up of fresh-faced students, the group have wound up on Holm Front Records (Sports Team’s label) and the handful of songs they have released are bristling with potential. 15 bands you should listen to in 2020 Sorry There’s an unnerving dissonance that pervades the output of Sorry, who are fellow members of London’s Brixton Windmill scene alongside acts such as Shame and Goat Girl. Their lyrics flirt with the realities of depression and feelings of awkwardness, carried along by waves of grunge-inspired guitar hooks. 15 bands you should listen to in 2020 Squid Squid are a fantastically anarchic outfit who dabble musically in a little bit of everything. Really, everything – their debut EP Town Centre contains spoken word, some haunting cello, jittery synths and sinewy guitar lines, all atop a rhythm section which is prone to change pace like a skittish springbok evading a cheetah. 15 bands you should listen to in 2020 Just Mustard Unlike their fellow compatriots The Murder Capital and Fontaines DC, Just Mustard’s music is more likely to slink through a back window, as opposed to battering down the front door. The Irish shoegazers employ screaming guitars atop a slow, enticing tempo, as vocalist Katie Ball’s eerie melodies dance between the speakers. 15 bands you should listen to in 2020 Feet With the release of their debut album What’s Inside Is More Than Just Ham, Feet have cemented themselves at the vanguard of the post-punk revival. Melding psychedelia-infused guitar lines with elements of funk and a refreshing, quintessentially British sense of humour, the group’s future looks bright, having recently embarked on their first national headline tour. 15 bands you should listen to in 2020 Sports Team This six-piece indie outfit from Cambridge have been on an upward spiral since the release of ‘Winter Nets’ in early 2018, and have already established themselves as the frontrunners of the burgeoning indie-revival. Frontman Alex Brice’s dry, self-aware lyricism is at the core of everything they do and provides the centre-piece for their chaotic, sometimes surreal live shows, where the refrain: ‘I wanna buy you a flip screen Motorola’ is screamed by the crowd. 15 bands you should listen to in 2020 Hotel Lux Hotel Lux play a swaggering style of “pub rock”, evocative of acts such as the Blockheads and Dr Feelgood. Their lyrical content, however, is something far darker and more brooding than anything mainstream acts of that era produced. There’s a haunting way in which singer Lewis Duffin tackles subjects that most wouldn’t touch, such as execution and paedophilia. 15 bands you should listen to in 2020 Junodream Although still very much a band in its infancy, Junodream have already established a finely shaped sound. Nostalgia-inducing vocal melodies blended with otherworldly guitars are reminiscent of early Radiohead, helping these up-and-comers land a support slot on a national tour with indie peers Lazy Days. 15 bands you should listen to in 2020 Kawala At first, Kawala's yearning harmonies might remind you of early Fleet Foxes or Bombay Bicycle Club. But there's a deeper energy that lingers beneath their folk influences – perhaps it's the surprising (in a good way) Afrobeats sound these London-based lads have injected into what could otherwise be your typical indie band. 15 bands you should listen to in 2020 Yowl The Peckham based five-piece have been steadily growing out of their post-punk beginnings into a fantastical musical realm that is purely their own. Dark, poetic lyrics delivered in an off-kilter fashion weave in and out of snarling guitar lines, making for an intriguing end product. 15 bands you should listen to in 2020 Pillow Queens This Dublin four-piece trade in subversive songwriting that tackles everything from body image (on the punchy "HowDoILook") to modern masculinity (the tender "Brothers"). Expect a debut album this year.

They decided, for the time being, to stick with what they knew in Raphael. Then Hammond Jr had a suggestion: he’d been put in touch with a guy name David Kahne. He was an old hand with a proven record as a hit maker. The rest of the band were amenable. Now all they had to do was break the news to Raphael. So Hammond told their regular guy that he would produce and Kahne engineer.

“I said to Albert, ‘I like the way I engineer,” Raphael recalled. “But if this will help some kid’s career, I’m not gonna say ‘no’. So I was very surprised when this veteran guy showed up in the studio and told me, ‘I was head of Columbia and I signed Jeff Buckley’ … I worked with Paul McCartney – and that’s him on the phone now’.”

“David Kahne is a pretty complex person,” Casablancas would say. “We heard of him as just some guy who had technical knowledge. Who knew about stuff we didn’t know. We wanted to sound bigger and stronger and all of that. For a while it didn’t work though. It was weird for a while, man. David and Gordon… they were not the closest of chums.”

Raphael begged to be allowed to leave. The Strokes were initially reluctant to let him go. As the producer recounted: “I said, “Julian, I don’t really like this scene. I want to go.” And he said, “Please stay.” “Why? I’m not doing anything.” “Well, because if you leave, we’re going to fire Dave Kahne because we don’t know how to talk to him. But we think he’s onto something with our sound, and we need you to stay in case we need you to explain what we mean.”

Still, Raphael finally walked away and Kahne took over. However, it turned out that his history as a chart-conquerer was not quite as cast-iron as Hammond Jr had initially believed. One of his biggest selling records was MTV Unplugged: Tony Bennett, which had admittedly won the 1995 Grammy for Album of the Year. So he knew what he was doing. But he wasn’t going to be a George Martin to The Strokes’ Beatles.

Then what producer could have worked a miracle with The Strokes at that point in their lifespan? Relationships within the ranks were deteriorating rapidly. Not every group, it is true, lives on bonhomie. Radiohead would still probably sound like Radiohead regardless of how chirpy the individual musicians were feeling. The Strokes were different. They were a band but they were also supposed to be a gang. Their early aura – the one that emanates so powerfully from This Is It – had as much to do with their “us against the world” sensibility as with their songs

However, by 2006 they were all in their late twenties. Several were married. There were even children. Things couldn’t be liked the used to. And if The Strokes weren’t the coolest gang in rock, what was even the point?

“When we first started we went on the road, all we had was each other. Now we’re working,” lamented Hammond Jr in 2006. “Then when we come home and have our own lives. It’s very sad.”

Tellingly, not everyone was grieving for what was lost. “I don’t want my daughter to think of me as a Stroke,” shrugged bassist Nikolai Fraiture. “I want her to think of me as father and eventually raised that that’s my job.”

When First Impressions of Earth came out, it was widely regarded as the worst thing The Strokes had ever done. Yes, it charted strongly, giving the group their first UK No 1 and entering at four in the US. But second week sales fell of a cliff, as word of mouth got around that they group had dropped a clunker. By the end of the year, it had sold just 271,000 units – less than half of Room on Fire’s 591,000. It probably didn’t help that the full record had leaked the previous November. Or that the lead single “Juicebox” was widely agreed to be the weakest of the 14 tracks.

“A band futilely grasping in all directions,” was the assessment of Pitchfork. The Independent’s Andy Gill agreed, declaring the new Strokes the perfect companion piece to a similarly disappointing comeback record by Franz Ferdinand. “Both bands plot their arrangements too methodically, and the resulting coldness, in this case, effectively curdles much of the album’s appeal.”

“They wanted this record to be really serious and big and professional,” Raphael lamented to Spin. “They think that’s what held them back in America.” Yet what was really holding The Strokes back, it transpired, is that they now longer wanted to sound like The Strokes.

“That’s probably the first time I noticed it had stopped being fun, the recording of First Impressions of Earth. That’s when things started getting into the gap,” Hammond would say. “Friends, girlfriends, strangers would all start coming in, being like, “You should be a bigger band,” and I was like, “Yeah, we should be a bigger band.””

“They seemed a lot older. A lot older. And it had only been, like, two years,” said the late Spin writer Mark Spitz in 2017. “And they seemed defeated in a weird way. And impatient, like they just wanted it to be over, you know? They were not deluded that maybe it was over, their moment was over.”