STROKE OF GENIUS
The Strokes’ Is This It
NME AUGUST 25, 2001
IT’S the best kind of New York story. One that mixes impossible glamour with brief excursions to the wild side. That starts in a basement, and ends in huge acclaim. That features good-looking participants in a potentially dirty business. A story too good to be true to be the real thing, surely? Like the title seems to ask – is this really it? Oh, it is. If ‘it’ is 11 songs and 37 minutes of concise and elegant rock music by five young men. If ‘it’ is a truly great statement of intent, one of the all-too-infrequent calls to arms that guitar music can provide, one of the best and most characterful debut albums of the past 20 years. If ‘it’ is touching, soulful, funny, tuneful and well-written songs played by people in great clothing, then yes, it is. It is ‘it’.