>> is this it
The Strokes · Is This It · 2001 · Julian Casablancas, Nick Valensi, Albert Hammond Jr., Nikolai Fraiture, Fabrizio Moretti
The best album of the 2000s is not the biggest one. It is not the most ambitious, the most expensive, or the most obviously important. It is the one that arrived looking almost careless and then quietly reset the room. Is This It sounds like five people who knew exactly what to leave out.
The record is all economy. The guitars do not decorate the songs; they lock into them. The drums are dry, close, and almost rude in their refusal to overplay. The bass keeps the architecture standing. Julian Casablancas sings through a narrow frequency band that makes every line feel both bored and wounded.
What makes it endure is the tension between looseness and control. It appears casual, but the casualness is engineered. The songs are short because they are finished. They stop before the idea gets tired. There is no grand concept, no ornamental seriousness, no attempt to tell you how much it matters.
The 2000s produced bigger records and stranger records. Kid A changed the weather. Funeral made grief communal. Discovery made machines feel generous. But Is This It has the sharper miracle: it made rock music feel young again without pretending innocence.
It is also a New York record without postcard mythology. The city here is not skyline or romance. It is rooms, bars, bad timing, fluorescent light, the emotional precision of trying to seem less affected than you are. The glamour is in the restraint.
The title asks a question that the album answers by refusing to argue. Yes, this is it. Ten songs, clean lines, perfect weariness, and the sound of a decade finding one of its most useful shapes.