There’s also a naked vulnerability to the song that you won’t find on Is This It or Room on Fire. “Wish I wasn’t so shy,” Julian sings towards the end, and, though couched among the rest of the song’s contradictions, it’s crystal clear that it is not a put-on.
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“I want to be one of those people,” Julian told The Gaurdian in 2001, “be they writers, poets, musicians, who leaves clues for the next generation. The really good people leave clues that help feed the human race; that’s my aspiration. The only thing that’s important is the songs that we write and record. That’s the only proof that we existed and were any good.”
“I have only one fear,” he told Q the following year. “That we let ourselves down by not fulfilling the promise of continuing progression, because we’ve started well but I don’t think it’s worth anything yet.”
“Sometimes you’re not thinking and sometimes you’re over thinking,” says Julian today. “I’ve had songs come out of both. So you just keep at it, keep in your mind what you don’t want to do, and keep in mind what you strive to do.
The thing is, the thing that you’re striving to do doesn’t exist yet, so you don’t know what that is,” he says with a laugh. “You gotta go from there, try to push tings, try to make things happen your own way. Sometimes a lot comes out of nothing, but you gotta keep trudging through, no matter what.”
With First Impressions of Earth, The Strokes have reset the board, proven they can evolve, that they’re not a one-trick pony and that their musical future is wide open. They have accepted their major label makeover, upgraded their distinctive sound and came out stronger for it. They’ve made their mark and increased the odds exponentially so that, no matter where they go from here, their next album will not suck. And maybe, just maybe, they’ll be thought of as a band with something to say.
I enjoyed this.