Is This It

The Strokes made downtown scruffiness sound like a decision, tuning guitars and vocals through the same lo-fi filter until the whole band arrives as one deliberately blown-out object.

Take "Last Nite," where Julian Casablancas sings like he's phoning in from another room and the two guitars lock into a groove so clean it borders on choreography. That gap — sloppy voice over airtight playing — is the trick that a hundred bands would spend the next decade failing to copy, mistaking the fuzz for the point. "Hard to Explain" runs the same math, a mechanical drum pulse under melodies that ache more than the delivery admits. What sounds tossed off here was assembled with a jeweler's patience, and that contradiction is why the record outlasted the leather-jacket revival it kicked off.