2016 was, as others have noted, an especially bad year for rock ‘n’ roll. But it wasn’t just because the genre lost some of its longtime titans in David Bowie, Prince, George Martin, and Glenn Frey; it was also because a remarkably small number of bands were prepared to fill the void left by their passing. Even the few “traditional” rock bands that released rock records in 2016 failed to summon up the same level of excitement as in years past. “I think you could argue that 2016 might be the first year where a band like Radiohead could release a great album and not move the needle,” King says when I bring up the elephant in the room. He has a point: A Moon Shaped Pool finished the year at No. 73 on the Billboard 200 despite being a hugely anticipated release from one of the world’s biggest rock bands.

2012, the year in which Celebration Rock was released, was much kinder to rock music. Earnest, back-to-basics albums by Mumford & Sons and The Black Keys both cracked the year-end Top 10, driven by the same retro engine that powered indie and alt-rock hits like Celebration Rock, Cloud Nothings’ Attack on Memory, and The Gaslight Anthem’s Handwritten.

A kind of inspired nostalgia seems to be the one thing all of these albums have in common. They didn’t set out to reinvent the wheel, but rather to celebrate rock’s history and reclaim something vital about it. Perhaps none of them qualify as timeless or even great rock records in hindsight, but at least they were culturally, critically, and commercially relevant in the year of their release. At the time, it seemed that nostalgia, however paradoxically, could be the gateway to a bright future for rock ‘n’ roll.

After all, this had happened before, not so long ago and not so far away from Japandroids’ cozy Airbnb in the East Village. New York City in the early 2000s played host to the first wave of rock revivalists who took their cues from ‘70s and ‘80s post-punk — think The Strokes, Interpol, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Rapture, and so on. “I think you could argue that, all of a sudden, there was an explosion of bands who all seemed to be culling influence-wise from the same melting pot,” says King, reflecting on those New York bands in particular.

He sees the same trend today with bands like Japandroids and Beach Slang and Titus Andronicus, all of whom are obviously indebted to ‘80s punk, particularly The Replacements, but something crucial has changed. Whereas The Strokes, The White Stripes, and all their retro-minded brethren played out their drama in the national spotlight and enjoyed titles like “the saviors of rock ‘n’ roll,” Japandroids and their generation of rock bands have been relegated to a much smaller stage. The critical difference between these two eras of rock revivalism — one wildly successful, the other relegated to the sidelines of pop culture — lies less in the music itself than in the culture that has shifted and evolved around it.

For instance, the album. Rock music has held onto this artifact more stubbornly than nearly every other genre, despite the fact that overall album sales continue to decline at a precipitous rate thanks to the increased popularity of streaming and customizable playlists. Pop, a genre that places its highest priority on the hit single, has adapted to this trend wholeheartedly, as has hip-hop with its proud tradition of mixtapes. Most of the biggest releases of 2016 played fast and loose with the conventional idea of the “album,” whether it was Kanye West endlessly retooling his Life of Pablo, Chance the Rapper releasing his Coloring Book mixtape for free, or Beyoncé releasing her “visual album,” Lemonade, accompanied by a one-hour film aired on HBO.

When talking to Japandroids and several other rock acts with prominent releases coming up, a different theme begins to emerge. All of these artists seem conceptually tied to a more conservative idea of the album, and many of them get noticeably excited when talking about things like cover art and tracklists. “I don’t know if other bands are like this or not, but we have a tendency to start shaping the sequencing even as we’re still recording the album,” says King. “With this one, we had a pretty clear idea of where certain songs were going to be. ‘Arc of Bar’ was going to open Side B, ‘Near to the Wild Heart of Life’ was going to start the album and so on.”

This kind of talk would sound almost like gibberish to today’s casual music fan, who probably hasn’t ever had to flip a vinyl record over to Side B and almost certainly doesn’t care about what kicks off that side. But those who listen more exclusively to rock do seem to share this persistent fetish with the album, as BuzzAngle Music reports that a staggering 63% of vinyl albums sold in 2016 were from the combined rock genres (rock made up less than 10% of total album consumption — a far less impressive but equally telling figure).

Though King has long stressed over things like the uniformity of Japandroids’ cover art and other album-specific qualities that mean far less in the digital age, he’s not alone. Even young artists like 22-year-old Melina Duterte of Oakland’s Jay Som talk in hushed tones about building the perfect rock record.

“It was important that this one was a traditional debut album,” Duterte says of her forthcoming Everybody Works, careful to distinguish it from the “collection of songs” that was 2016’s Turn Into. “I spent some time thinking about the tracklisting, and that took a pretty long time, just figuring out the flow and the order of songs and also how the art connects to the music. So yeah, I guess I took a more traditional approach.”

While not without artistic merit, at the very least this “traditional approach” symbolizes a disconnect between rock’s focus on the tactile qualities of music and the general public’s increased willingness — preference, even — to engage with music in a less hands-on format. It’s no secret that the current crisis in rock neatly coincides with the rise of Spotify and other streaming services that went online in the early 2010s but have since lapped album downloads and physical sales.