The New Abnormal

THE NEW ABNORMAL: SEVEN YEARS OF STATIC, FINALLY RESOLVED

The New Abnormal by The Strokes — released April 10, 2020, on Cult and RCA Records — is the band’s sixth studio album and their most cohesive record since the early 2000s.
It was their first full-length album since Comedown Machine (2013), marking the longest gap between studio albums by the band.
That seven-year silence carried weight. The indie rock world had moved on, fractured into microgenres, and the Strokes had spent the interim years as a band in name only — Julian Casablancas doing one thing, the rest doing another. Then Rick Rubin entered the picture, and something clicked back into place. Not perfectly. Not without friction. But unmistakably.

Production Architecture: Rubin Strips It Back, Mostly

The album was produced by Rick Rubin and recorded at his Shangri-La studio in Malibu, California, with additional recording taking place at studios in Los Angeles County and Hawaii.
The geography matters. Shangri-La sits on the Pacific Coast Highway, analog in ethos, built for artists who need space and silence rather than city pressure. The Strokes, who made their bones on the compressed anxieties of Manhattan, recording in Malibu is a conceptual tension that actually serves the album. Something in the remove loosened them up.

Rubin’s production philosophy here is selective subtraction rather than addition. The guitars on “The Adults Are Talking” occupy a register that would be cluttered in lesser hands — Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr. run their interlocking lines with room to breathe, the low-end sits firm without the midrange sludge that plagued Angles (2011). The opening track is the most surgical piece of sequencing the band has managed in two decades: it announces a record that has decided what it is.

“Selfless” reaches back to a melodic warmth closer to Room on Fire‘s pacing than anything in the post-2006 catalog — Casablancas in upper register, the rhythm section unhurried, the arrangement trusting its own gravity. “Eternal Summer,” at over six minutes, is the longest Strokes track on record at the time and works primarily through tonal patience:
it is a guitar-soaked track almost entirely sung in falsetto, carrying swagger with just enough indie rock to keep it in the band’s idiom.

Critics generally considered the album to be an indie rock record, with one writer noting it blended indie rock and “new wave mixed with electronica,” while another wrote that it leans more towards “disco-tinged post-punk than the garage rock they made their name with.”
That push-pull between garage primitivism and synthesizer modulation is audible throughout — and it’s where Rubin earns his keep. He doesn’t resolve the tension so much as let both impulses coexist on the same track, which is more honest than picking a lane. For a band with a comparable late-period arc, the deliberate slow burn of Arctic Monkeys’ The Car (2022) offers an instructive parallel — the move toward orchestrated restraint, the willingness to let songs sit in their own discomfort.

Reviewers found that the second half of the album has a much slower pace and is more dedicated to ballads.
That structural choice is deliberate. Closing track “Ode to the Mets” — named for Casablancas’s baseball team, not a metaphor, which is somehow more endearing — runs nearly five minutes and ends the record on an elegiac note that the band’s earlier catalog never permitted itself.

Casablancas on the Page: Lyrical Specificity and Strategic Vagueness

Praise was directed particularly towards the maturity of singer Julian Casablancas’s lyrics, as well as the band’s improved sense of musical cohesion.
This is broadly accurate, though it requires unpacking. Casablancas has always written in a register of deliberate opacity — phrases that sound like they resolve but don’t, images that gesture at meaning without committing to it. On The New Abnormal, this technique feels more purposeful than on Comedown Machine, where the opacity read as disengagement.

“Bad Decisions” is the most discussed track in critical circles for a reason that cuts against its commercial polish:
in the Pitchfork review, Sam Sodomsky noted that the album “mostly just feels like a hangover” and that “the strongest hooks are so familiar that they require additional writing credits for the ’80s hits they copy note-for-note.”
The Billy Idol interpolation — “Dancing with Myself” — is audible and credited. Whether that constitutes a flaw or a feature depends on your view of the band’s long-standing relationship with their influences. The Strokes have never been shy about the degree to which they wear their sources. What matters is what they do with the frame, and “Bad Decisions” — structurally a power-pop song about political nihilism and romantic compromise — uses that familiar chassis to carry something slightly more corrosive than its surface suggests.

“At the Door” opens the record on a synthetic pulse — no guitar at all for its first half, just synthesizer and Casablancas’s voice sitting in an exposed midrange register. Lyrically it circles questions of personal accountability and failed intimacy without dramatizing either. There’s a flatness to the delivery that functions as its own emotional argument: this is what exhaustion actually sounds like, not what it performs like.

The balladic back half of the record — “Why Are Sundays So Depressing,” “Not the Same Anymore,” “Ode to the Mets” — carries the lyrical weight of the album. Casablancas writes about time passing and things not recovering with a specificity that his earlier work rarely allowed.
One critic observed that “disillusion and disappointment have become fuel for creation, not self-immolation; second-guessing has been replaced by first-hand emotion.”
That’s a fair summary of the vocal performance here — Casablancas sounds like he means it, which is not something that could always be said in the years between Room on Fire and this record.

Vocally, the upper-register falsetto work on “Eternal Summer” is a genuine development. It’s not a showpiece — there’s no moment designed to announce the technique — but its sustained deployment over a long, loping track demonstrates that Casablancas’s instrument has expanded in range even as his delivery has grown more economical.

Geographic Resonance: New York Mythology, Global Reach

The Strokes are a New York band in the way that certain New York bands carry the city as a functional abstraction — not a street-level documentary but a mythology, a set of textures and attitudes that travel. The New Abnormal was not made in New York,
but its title derived from a quote by former California governor Jerry Brown during the California wildfires of 2018 — the fires had especially impacted Malibu, the location of Rubin’s Shangri-La studio at which the band were recording, though the studio itself was left unharmed.
The title carried extra layers it wasn’t designed to carry:
a New York Times writer noted in his review that the title was a fitting description for public life during the COVID-19 pandemic,
and it dropped squarely into that context on April 10, 2020 — weeks into a global lockdown.

That timing explains a significant portion of the album’s emotional footprint. In the United States, 125,152 Last.fm listeners represent the strongest single-market concentration — expected, given the band’s lineage and the domestic reach of Cult/RCA. But the Brazil figure of 41,880 listeners warrants attention. Brazil has long maintained a robust indie rock infrastructure, with São Paulo’s live circuit sustaining strong demand for New York-lineage post-punk revival artists. The Strokes occupy a particular niche there: bands with an aesthetic rooted in perceived authenticity and urban cool tend to index highly in Brazilian markets that fetishize the early-2000s guitar-rock moment as a kind of peak cultural reference point.

The United Kingdom’s 30,306 listeners reflect both the band’s historical NME-era canonization and a sustained critical goodwill that UK music culture tends to extend to New York guitar bands with Manhattan mythology. The British press was, after all, partly responsible for the Strokes’ initial ascent — the band’s early singles were released on Rough Trade before they had a proper US deal. That lineage creates a different quality of engagement: listeners who came to the band through the UK press read the record through a longer frame of reference.

The album’s coverage of 43 countries signals healthy international IP strength. Argentina (6,717 listeners) and Chile (5,396) — both historically strong markets for North American indie rock — reflect a Latin American footprint that extends beyond Brazil and suggests real regional demand.
The album artwork features the 1981 painting Bird on Money by American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat,
which carries its own cultural currency internationally: Basquiat is a globally legible signifier of downtown New York credibility, particularly in markets where that mythology is consumed as cultural export.

Critical Assessment: The Best Strokes Album You’ll Argue About

At Metacritic, the album received a weighted average score of 75, based on 25 reviews, indicating “generally favorable reviews.”
That 75 is both accurate and misleading — the score flattens a critical response that was genuinely bifurcated. The enthusiasm at one end was real.
Will Hodgkinson of The Times awarded the album five out of five stars, labeling it their “second masterpiece” following Is This It (2001), and praised Rick Rubin’s production for making “the Strokes sound like a band again.”

AllMusic’s Heather Phares called it “full of passion, commitment, and creativity,” proclaiming that “The New Abnormal marks the first time in a while that the Strokes have made truly exciting music.”

The skepticism at the other end was also real.
Kaelen Bell of Exclaim! had mixed feelings, saying it is “not a bad record, but it is a frustrating one, made by a band that feels pulled in a dozen different directions.”

Kitty Empire of the Observer regarded the album as a “frustrating listen despite its gleam,” adding that “faster tempos would have helped.”
Both critiques are honest responses to the same set of facts: this is a record that achieves cohesion at the cost of urgency. The band no longer sounds like they’re running from something. Whether that’s maturity or dissipation depends, I think, on which Strokes album you loved first.

What works, specifically: the sequencing is the best of their career. Track one (“The Adults Are Talking”) through track four (“Brooklyn Bridge to Chorus”) forms a front half that maintains tempo and interest without repeating itself. Rubin’s decision to let the record breathe in its latter half — committing fully to the ballad mode rather than hedging back toward power-pop — is a structural bet that mostly pays off. “Not the Same Anymore” is one of the most emotionally precise things Casablancas has written. “Ode to the Mets” earns its length.

What doesn’t fully work: “Brooklyn Bridge to Chorus” is pleasant but structurally thin, the kind of track that functions well in sequence but doesn’t hold up in isolation. The mid-tempo drift of “Bad Decisions” — despite its interpolation cleverness — sits uneasily between the album’s more committed choices.
As one critic noted, “every time The Strokes tap into their old power, they get distracted by a shiny but fruitless new direction” — though not every risk here is a wash, and the album resonates most “when The Strokes don’t try to be something they’re not.”

The album went on to win Best Rock Album at the 63rd Annual Grammy Awards
— a validation that arrived before the conversation had fully settled. The Grammy didn’t close the debate; it just added a credential to one side of it. That’s probably appropriate for a record this genuinely contested. For listeners interested in how indie rock’s guitar-band tradition navigates late-career reinvention, the Pavement retrospective Hecklers Choice: Big Gums and Heavy Lifters (2025) offers a useful reference point for how differently a band of similar vintage can occupy the same critical territory. And for a contemporary example of a rock act wrestling with synthesis, experimentation, and legacy expectations in near real-time, Florence + the Machine’s Everybody Scream (2025) makes for an instructive read-alongside.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where can I stream The New Abnormal?

The New Abnormal is available on all major streaming platforms, including Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Tidal. It is also available for purchase and download through digital retailers. The album page on Get Music is at getmusic.com.tr/album/the-new-abnormal/.

How did The New Abnormal perform commercially and critically?

It debuted at number eight on the US Billboard 200, selling 35,000 album-equivalent units in its first week, and topped the Top Rock Albums chart, marking the band’s strongest commercial performance in nearly a decade.

At Metacritic, it received a weighted average score of 75, based on 25 reviews, indicating “generally favorable reviews.”

It also won the Grammy Award for Best Rock Album at the 63rd Annual Grammy Awards in 2021, the band’s first nomination and win.

Which tracks stand out most on the album?

“The Adults Are Talking” is the album’s most fully realized track — production, songwriting, and performance in alignment. “Selfless” and “Not the Same Anymore” represent the band’s strongest ballad work in the post-Is This It era. “Eternal Summer,” at over six minutes, is the most ambitious structural experiment on the record and largely succeeds. “Ode to the Mets” is the most emotionally candid thing Casablancas has committed to tape.

What albums are similar to The New Abnormal?

For late-career guitar-band albums that balance legacy pressure with genuine creative re-engagement, Arctic Monkeys’ The Car (2022) is the closest contemporary analog — slower, more orchestrated, equally contested. The Pavement collection Hecklers Choice: Big Gums and Heavy Lifters (2025) situates the early-2000s indie rock tradition in broader historical context. For a more current indie rock release with a strong songwriter-as-architect ethos, Sarah Kinsley’s Escaper (2024) rewards comparison.