The Strokes

Julian Casablancas, Nick Valensi and Fabrizio Moretti started playing together as teenagers at Manhattan's Dwight School; Nikolai Fraiture was Casablancas's childhood friend from the Lycée Français, and Albert Hammond Jr., who knew Casablancas from a Swiss boarding school, arrived at the end of 1998. They played their first show as the Strokes on September 14, 1999, and rehearsed most nights while holding down part-time jobs; Mercury Lounge booker Ryan Gentles quit to manage them.

A three-song demo cut with producer Gordon Raphael became The Modern Age EP on Rough Trade in January 2001, setting off a label bidding war described as the biggest for a rock band in years; RCA won in March. Early sessions with Pixies producer Gil Norton were scrapped as "too clean," and the album was made in six weeks in Raphael's Transporterraum basement in the East Village. Casablancas sang through a small Peavey practice amp, and every song was mixed on eleven tracks or fewer.

Is This It arrived in Australia on July 30, 2001, hit number two in Britain in August, and then ran into September 11: the U.S. CD slipped to October 9, "New York City Cops" — "they ain't too smart" — was swapped for "When It Started," and the cover of a gloved hand on a bare hip gave way to a bubble-chamber photograph. The title lost its question mark because it "did not look right." Entertainment Weekly and Time named it album of the year, Roman Coppola shot the videos, and "Last Nite" openly borrowed Tom Petty's "American Girl" (("That made me laugh out loud," Petty said. "I was like, 'OK, good for you.'")).

Room on Fire (2003) went gold and First Impressions of Earth (2006) followed, but neither repeated the moment; after a five-year hiatus came Angles (2011) and Comedown Machine (2013), and in 2020 The New Abnormal, produced by Rick Rubin, won the Grammy for Best Rock Album. NME named Is This It the best album of the 2000s and Rolling Stone ranked it second. Casablancas, for the record, told The Guardian in 2024 that "Last Nite" is "pretty dead to me."