Mystique has always been a key part of rock iconography, which might explain why Julian Casablancas has remained at arms’ length for so long. At his main act’s creative peak, the Strokes frontman had a confounding, emotionally distant aura. A notorious Rolling Stone profile from 2003—right around the time of the excellent, second-verse-same-as-the-first sophomore effort Room on Fire—portrayed him as a contradictory, besotted rascal, as he unleashed invectives against Pringles, haggled with a bootleg CD vendor over a Radiohead album, and repeatedly kissed journalist Neil Strauss on the neck before drunkenly commandeering an abandoned wheelchair.

“I just don’t have anything deep to say...I’ve got nothing to hide,” he claimed in what Strauss referred to as “the worst interview ever,” and by the time the Strokes put out the career-deflating 2006 record First Impressions of Earth, he was committing the sentiment to tape. In the years that followed, Casablancas sobered up and more or less faded out of view. Near the end of the '00s, he popped up with a solo album of sugary power-pop in the form of the better-than-you-remember Phrazes for the Young, citing the Choose Your Own Adventure books as sonic inspiration; 2011 brought the Strokes’ fourth album, the curiously flat Angles, which was written and recorded without Casablancas entering the same room as his bandmates. By the time last year’s aptly named Comedown Machine saw release, the Strokes—Casablancas, especially—sounded exhausted, as mediocrity came to define the band’s second decade of existence. Instead of failing outright, the Strokes simply became boring.

Regardless of their place in the rock landscape, Casablancas and the Strokes still represent a certain level of aesthetic “cool,” at home and beyond. Many acts from the early-'00s new-rock explosion have retained a considerable level of popularity in Europe, and the Strokes themselves have a distinctly French appeal. Casablancas himself reached his own Gallic pièce de résistance by appearing on Daft Punk’s year-flattening musical odyssey Random Access Memories, lending a soft-focus vocal to the metronomic, neon-melancholy single “Instant Crush”.

His latest musical venture, Julian Casablancas + the Voidz, is a group comprised of session musicians and alt-rock barnacles—guitarist Jeramy Gritter was a member of the mercifully defunct, reality-show-reject outfit Whitestarr—plucked from Casablancas’ current home base of Los Angeles. The best you can say about the band’s debut, Tyranny, is that it's the most interesting thing Casablancas has done since facing off against Guided by Voices on “Family Feud”; it’s a record that's as adventurous as it is unlistenable, a spectacular failure that smacks of both fellow L.A. denizen and gonzo-pop misfit Ariel Pink’s AM-radio abstractions and “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” ne’er-do-well Charlie’s warped musical efforts. If Angles and Comedown Machine sounded like the work of a group that was running out of steam, Tyranny is a record overloaded with ideas, a palette of vibrant colors swirled together until there’s nothing left but brown.

Casablancas recently told GQ that he’s optimistic about Tyranny’s commercial prospects, which is hilarious if you've actually heard the album. Clocking in at an endless 62 minutes—10 more than bloated First Impressions of Earth—with six of its 12 songs stretching well over the five-minute mark, Tyranny is designed to be impenetrable, a blaring monolith of excess. There are a few ideas buried in the unending screech, suggesting that Casablancas has a raw and unique creative mind, if not the compositional smarts to pull off something this dense. “Take Me in Your Army” and “Nintendo Blood” begin with gorgeous, digitized sighs, 8-bit renderings of the Strokes’ finest, most subtle melancholic moments, but the latter dissolves in an acid bath of guitar squeals and off-beat drum machines, while the former meanders towards a slow-hand guitar solo that smacks of a “shredding” YouTube video made specifically to mock the work of John Carpenter. “M.utally A.ssured D.estruction” packs thrash metal figures and horror movie synths into an energizing two-and-a-half minutes, while the seven-minute-plus “Father Electricity” offers a kalimba-like rhythmic backbone and, after several minutes of useless dithering, a sprightly Afro-pop melody that doubles as the record’s most pleasant surprise.

On the other end of the spectrum is “Human Sadness”, the nearly 11-minute cut released as the album’s first single, ostensibly to confound the expectations of anyone who hadn’t caught Casablancas + the Voidz’s run of incompetent festival performances over the past year. The song is essentially a modern “Bohemian Rhapsody”, if Queen’s pomp-rock classic was twice as long and had only two or three distinct musical movements. After a brief bit of twinkling ambience and a vocal sample referencing the album’s vague theme of capitalistic pitfalls, Disney strings enter alongside an ambling bass line that sounds like a Strokes song played at half-tempo. Then, the song pretty much stays there, Casablancas alternating between a bedside mumble and glass-shattering vocal histrionics as a parade of sounds—a cackling, distorted laugh, ear-bleeding guitars, video game sounds, crashing drums—piles on top of the song’s dirge-like rhythm. Intentionally or not, it plays like “The Story of Everest” in musical form.

“I love being weird/ It’s so weird,” Casablancas tosses off underneath the grating motifs of “Business Dog”, and this particular line speaks volumes on Tyranny’s try-hard stab at eccentricity. (Good luck hearing it without a lyric sheet, though: the words here are the most endearingly bonkers rantings Casablancas has ever put to tape and the album’s execrable production largely buries his vocals to the point where you can barely hear him.) “He must be on drugs” is a typical invective thrown at artists who flirt with career suicide in the way that Casablancas is doing here, but Tyranny is too willfully weird, too labored-sounding, too beholden to its melted-frequency artifice to be merely the product of a substance-addled mind.

As that GQ article highlighted, the common assumption is that Casablancas wrote the first two Strokes albums, a rock lore factoid that suggests prodigiousness from a guy who’s spent the last 15 years looking like he’s never worked a day in his life; on Tyranny, that guy has simply worked too hard, and that sense of needless toil bleeds through in every bum lick, brick-walled sound, and garbled burst of noise shoved onto the record. Maybe Tyranny will one day have a second life as a misunderstood cult record, but in the here and now, it sounds terrible and beyond redemption.