You Only Live Once

“You Only Live Once” opens First Impressions of Earth, the third Strokes album, released in January 2006. It opens the record at a run. Julian Casablancas wrote it. David Kahne and Gordon Raphael produced. Two minutes and thirty-seven seconds, urgently paced, the guitar parts locked and interlocking the way early Strokes records always did. The title is a dare directed inward. The band knew exactly what album they were opening and what they needed the first track to do.

Is This It in 2001 did something real to rock music. It arrived at the point when guitar bands had become bloated and the indie underground had turned academic, and it was neither of those things. It was short, confident, and made everything around it sound overdressed. The post-punk revival it accelerated produced Interpol, LCD Soundsystem, the Arctic Monkeys, and a wave of bands who understood that restraint was a form of power. NME called it the greatest album of the decade. It debuted at number two in the UK. The template it set is still being used.

The Strokes formed in New York City in 1998. Casablancas, Nick Valensi, Albert Hammond Jr., Nikolai Fraiture, Fab Moretti. Five friends, a downtown aesthetic, a specific sound built from Television and the Velvet Underground stripped to its frame. They signed to RCA and released Is This It in 2001 to immediate critical consensus. Room on Fire followed in 2003. First Impressions of Earth debuted at number one in the UK on release. The run of three albums across five years remains one of the clearest arguments the 2000s made for guitar music.