The story of The Strokes

Five friends in Manhattan

The story starts on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where Julian Casablancas was born on the twenty third of August 1978. His father was John Casablancas, the man who founded the Elite modelling agency, and his mother, Jeanette Christiansen, had been crowned Miss Denmark in 1965. His parents split when he was eight, and Julian grew up mostly with his mother. The biggest influence on him turned out to be his stepfather, the Ghanaian painter Sam Adoquei. Until then Julian had mostly listened to Phil Collins. Sam handed him a tape by the Doors, and the boy who had dreamed of playing professional basketball started thinking about music instead.[1] [2] [3]

Julian was a troubled teenager. He has said he started drinking before he was even a teenager, and he was placed in an after school programme that worked as a form of rehab. When he was around thirteen, his father sent him to Institut Le Rosey, an exclusive boarding school in Switzerland, hoping to improve his grades and his habits. It did not cure the drinking, but it gave him something far more useful. At Le Rosey he befriended a younger American boy called Albert Hammond Junior, the son of the famous songwriter Albert Hammond. The two Americans bonded far from home, then went their separate ways for several years.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Julian's oldest friend in the band was Nikolai Fraiture. They met at the age of six at the Lycée Français de New York, a bilingual French school. Nikolai remembers the day they became close. A water main burst near the school, his parents were already at work, and he had nowhere to go. Julian simply said come home with me. Nikolai stayed three days, and they were friends from then on. Back in New York after Switzerland, Julian enrolled at the Dwight School, where he met a guitarist called Nick Valensi on the first day of orientation, and soon after a drummer called Fabrizio Moretti.[1] [2] [3]

Nick Valensi was born in New York in January 1981 to a Tunisian Jewish father and a French mother. He picked up his father's guitar at five, and his father died when Nick was nine. Fabrizio Moretti, known as Fab, was born in Rio de Janeiro in June 1980 to an Italian nuclear engineer and a Brazilian mother. The family moved to New York when he was three, planning to stay three years, and stayed seventeen. Fab practised drums in a soundproofed closet in the family apartment. Julian, Nick and Fab began playing together in Fab's room after school, while his parents banged on the walls and begged them to turn it down.[1] [2] [3]

Nikolai took up the bass at about eighteen, and the quartet played together through the late nineties. Older brothers and Julian's stepfather fed them Bob Marley, Jane's Addiction and the Velvet Underground. Then, in 1998, Albert Hammond Junior moved from Los Angeles to New York for film school and ran into Julian again. Within two weeks they were sharing a flat. Albert was invited to a rehearsal, and on his first night he had a high fever and the others got him drunk. He heard their songs and knew he wanted in. He was the fifth and final member, and it was Julian who suggested the name the Strokes, the one name nobody objected to.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

A basement demo changes everything

The plan was to rehearse for a year before playing live, and they rehearsed hard, often for ten hours at a stretch, in a rented room in Midtown Manhattan. They all had day jobs, in frozen yoghurt shops, record stores and bars. On the fourteenth of September 1999 they played their first show as the Strokes at a club called the Spiral. Albert later admitted they were so nervous that they went to see the Eddie Murphy comedy Bowfinger beforehand to calm down. The crowd was about six people, all of them friends. From there they worked the small clubs of the Lower East Side, including the Luna Lounge and the Mercury Lounge.[1] [2] [3]

Two men changed their fortunes. The first was Ryan Gentles, a young booker at the Mercury Lounge, who liked their demo, gave them four shows in December 2000, and soon quit his job to manage them full time. The second was Gordon Raphael, a Seattle born producer with a small basement studio called Transporterraum on Avenue A in the East Village. He saw the band at the Luna Lounge and handed out his card. They agreed a three day deal for six hundred dollars. Julian told him he wanted a sound unlike anything going on at the time, so Raphael simply recorded the five of them playing together in one room.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The demo held three songs, The Modern Age, Last Nite and Barely Legal. At his boss's suggestion, Gentles sent it to Geoff Travis, who had founded Rough Trade Records in London back in 1976 and had just revived the label. Travis was sold almost immediately and offered to release the recordings as they stood. The Modern Age EP came out in Britain on the twenty ninth of January 2001, and the music paper NME gave away Last Nite as a free download a week before the physical release. On the third of February the band played their first London show, bottom of the bill at an NME Awards gig at the Astoria.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The British reaction was astonishing. Nick Valensi later said it had taken two years to build a following in New York, and Rough Trade moved them past that with one release and one magazine article. Their first UK tour sold out before they even landed. Back home, the American labels came calling, and a bidding war broke out, the biggest for a rock band in years. The winner was RCA, whose A and R man Steve Ralbovsky had been unimpressed at two early shows. What changed his mind was standing outside the sold out Bowery Ballroom, listening through a window. In March 2001 the Strokes signed with RCA, while staying with Rough Trade in Britain.[1] [2] [3]

Is This It

RCA first paired the band with Gil Norton, the producer behind the Pixies, but the band felt the results sounded too clean, and those recordings were thrown out. So in the spring of 2001 they went back to Gordon Raphael's basement. Julian described the sound he wanted as a band from the past that took a time machine into the future to make its record. The drums were captured with just three microphones. Julian sang through a small practice amplifier to keep his voice rough, and he told Raphael he wanted it to sound like a favourite pair of worn in jeans. Most songs were recorded only once, the way Julian liked it.[1] [2] [3]

Not everyone was convinced. An RCA representative visited the sessions and complained that it all sounded cheap and unprofessional. Raphael remembers being told he was ruining Julian's voice. Julian won the label round by playing the new songs to him on a boom box. Meanwhile the band were touring hard in Britain. After a show in Glasgow on the twentieth of June 2001, Fab fell and broke his hand. Two shows were cancelled and a friend, Matt Romano, flew over to fill in. In August the band played the Reading and Leeds festivals, where demand was so great that they were moved from a tent to the main stage.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Is This It came out first in Australia on the thirtieth of July 2001, then in Japan and in Britain, where it reached number two. The American release was set for late September. Then came the eleventh of September. The attacks postponed the album to the ninth of October, and the band chose to drop the song New York City Cops from the American CD, replacing it with a new song, When It Started. The American vinyl had already been pressed for a release date of September eleventh, so it kept the original song. The cover changed too. The rest of the world got a photograph of a gloved hand on a bare hip, while America got an image of particle tracks in a bubble chamber.[1] [2]

The reviews were rapturous. NME gave the album ten out of ten, and it was named album of the year by NME, Billboard, Time and Entertainment Weekly, among others. In America it climbed slowly, jumping to number thirty three after the band appeared on Saturday Night Live in early 2002. It went gold in the United States and platinum in Britain, eventually selling around two million copies worldwide by 2003. The singles Hard to Explain, Last Nite and Someday all came with videos directed by Roman Coppola. In 2002 the band won Best International Newcomer at the Brit Awards and were named Band of the Year by Spin.[1] [2] [3]

The Strokes spent the next year on the road, including several dates opening for the Rolling Stones in North America. In August 2002 they headlined the Carling Weekend festivals in Britain and then played Radio City Music Hall in New York with the White Stripes. Jack White came on stage to play the guitar solo on New York City Cops, and he repeated it later that month at Reading. Some of the band quietly felt the hype had outrun them. The journalist Marc Spitz recalled Nick saying that the White Stripes, not the Strokes, deserved to be band of the year. The drinking, meanwhile, was getting heavier.[1] [2] [3]

Room on Fire and the weight of hype

For the second album the band hired Nigel Godrich, the Radiohead producer. It did not work. The band said the sessions felt soulless. Godrich put it more simply. He and Julian were both control freaks, he said, and there was no point in him being there if they would not try his way. None of those recordings has ever been released. The band went back to Gordon Raphael with three months of studio time left. Nick later said the album would have been a lot better with another couple of weeks. Room on Fire came out on the twenty first of October 2003 and reached number four in America and number two in Britain.[1] [2]

Critics generally liked it but kept saying the same thing, that it sounded too much like the first album. Pitchfork said the band had given birth to an identical twin. Albert later joked about the trap they were in. On Room on Fire they were criticised for sounding the same, and on the next album they were criticised for not sounding like Room on Fire. Julian has said he actually prefers Room on Fire and always saw it as part two of Is This It. Time has been kind to it. In 2021 Pitchfork said it would raise its original score, and that same year the album was certified platinum in America.[1] [2] [3]

The Room on Fire tour brought two young support acts into the spotlight. One was Kings of Leon, a Tennessee band whose early press sometimes billed them as the southern Strokes. The other was Regina Spektor, a singer from the downtown anti folk scene. She and Julian recorded a duet, Modern Girls and Old Fashion Men, as a B side to Reptilia. In December 2003 they played London's Alexandra Palace. A seventeen year old Alex Turner, who would soon form Arctic Monkeys, was in the crowd. That show was meant to become the band's first live album, but it was shelved over sound quality, and only their cover of the Clash's Clampdown was released.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Fame arrived with all its trappings. Fab began a highly public relationship with the actress Drew Barrymore in 2002, and it lasted until January 2007. Courtney Love befriended the band and wrote a song about Julian. Behind the scenes, their stubbornness was legendary. The band turned down a reported six hundred thousand dollar offer from Heineken to use one of their songs in an advert. Their manager Ryan Gentles had also begun managing Ryan Adams, but during the Room on Fire period the band insisted he stop, citing a clause in their contract. Adams took it badly. Around the same time, Albert was sliding further into drug use.[1] [2] [3] [4]

First Impressions and cracks in the gang

The third album took around ten months to make. The band started again with Gordon Raphael, but Albert introduced them to David Kahne, a Grammy winning producer who had worked with Paul McCartney and Tony Bennett. The two producers tried to work together, it did not work out, and Raphael stepped down after almost a year on the project. In late September 2005 the lead single Juicebox leaked online, forcing the band to rush it out as a download. It became their second top ten hit in Britain and, at number ninety eight, their only ever entry on the American Hot 100.[1] [2] [3] [4]

First Impressions of Earth came out on the third of January 2006. It gave the Strokes their first number one album in Britain and reached number four in America, and the band won Best International Band at the NME Awards. But the reviews were the harshest they had received, and sales faded faster than before. Singles Heart in a Cage and You Only Live Once followed. The B side of You Only Live Once was a cover of Marvin Gaye's Mercy Mercy Me, with Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam singing alongside Julian and Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age playing drums next to Fab.[1] [2] [3]

Inside the band, the mood had soured. Albert later said the First Impressions sessions were the first time he noticed it had stopped being fun, with friends and hangers on telling them they should be a bigger band. Nick admitted they wondered why the Killers' Mr. Brightside was the song everyone was listening to. A journalist who travelled with them on a South American tour described a band crumbling in front of his camera, full of resentment and tension. Julian, meanwhile, was trying to change. In the mid two thousands he gave up alcohol, later saying he had been living unsustainably and that his biggest regret was drinking so much.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The band kept touring through 2006, playing festivals across Europe and Asia. That autumn they opened five shows for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. It was a neat twist, since Petty had noticed that the opening of Last Nite closely resembled his song American Girl, and he said publicly that it made him laugh rather than angry. At the end of the tour Julian told fans the band would be taking an extended break, and Ryan Gentles confirmed a much needed break in an email to fans. Nobody knew it would last almost four years before they played a show again.[1] [2]

The long break

During the hiatus almost everyone made a record of his own. Albert went first with Yours to Keep in 2006, then Cómo Te Llama in 2008. Fab formed Little Joy in Los Angeles with the Brazilian singer Rodrigo Amarante and Binki Shapiro, releasing one sweet album on Rough Trade in 2008. Nikolai released The Time of the Assassins as Nickel Eye in 2009. Julian made his solo album Phrazes for the Young in 2009, recorded partly in Omaha with Mike Mogis of Bright Eyes, and launched his own label, Cult Records, to release it. Nick was the only member who did not put out a side project in those years.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Their private lives changed too. In 2005 Julian married Juliet Joslin, the band's assistant manager. In the summer of 2006 Nick married the English photographer and broadcaster Amanda de Cadenet, and they had twins. Nikolai had married the artist Ilona Jankovich in 2004. By 2011 Julian, Nick and Nikolai were all fathers, and Nikolai said parenthood swept away the rock and roll nonsense. Fab and Drew Barrymore split in January 2007, and that same year he revealed he had been ill with Lyme disease. Their manager Ryan Gentles later insisted the band never broke up. Each member simply wanted a few more months, and the timing never lined up.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The hardest chapter belonged to Albert. In the mid two thousands he developed a serious addiction to drugs, including heroin, cocaine and ketamine, which he has described openly in later interviews. When the band met to begin writing their fourth album in 2009, he hit what he called his lowest point. His bandmates came to his studio in upstate New York to record, saw the state he was in, and told him he had to go. With his mother present, he agreed to three months of rehab. He has said he felt he had killed everyone's dreams. He has stayed off drugs since, and speaks about that period without any romance.[1] [2] [3]

By 2009 the band were writing together again, and on the thirty first of March they announced on MySpace that their hibernation was over. It would still be a long road. On the ninth of June 2010 they tested the waters with a secret show at Dingwalls in London, billed under the name Venison, in front of just four hundred and eighty seven people. It was their first gig since October 2006, and they played no new songs. That summer they headlined festivals including the Isle of Wight and Lollapalooza. Meanwhile Julian was branching out, singing on the Lonely Island's comedy song Boombox and joining Jimmy Fallon for a Christmas song on television.[1] [2]

Angles, Comedown Machine and going quiet

For the first time, the fourth album was written by the whole band rather than mostly by Julian. That created its own problems. Sessions with the producer Joe Chiccarelli frustrated everyone, and only one song, Life Is Simple in the Moonlight, survived from them. The rest was reworked at Albert's home studio in upstate New York with the engineer Gus Oberg. Julian recorded his vocals separately and often sent his ideas by email, which Nick found miserable. He said he would not make another album that way. Fab offered a kinder reading, that Julian was deliberately stepping aside so the others would have to talk to each other more.[1] [2]

Angles was released in March 2011, preceded by the single Under Cover of Darkness, their first new single in five years, which briefly crashed their website on release day. The album entered at number one in Australia and number four in America, and reviews were broadly warm. Rolling Stone said it was worth the wait. On the first of April 2011 they played Madison Square Garden, where Elvis Costello joined them on stage for Taken for a Fool, and they headlined Coachella that same spring. In interviews, Albert talked about how happy he was to be clean, and Nick said the new way of working had to happen, or they would probably have broken up.[1] [2] [3]

Julian was also becoming a sought after collaborator. Through the director Warren Fu he met Daft Punk, who were fans, and he wrote and sang on Instant Crush for their 2013 album Random Access Memories. When that album won the Grammy for Album of the Year, Julian was one of the credited recipients. That July his father, John Casablancas, died in Rio de Janeiro at the age of seventy while being treated for cancer. The Strokes' fifth album, Comedown Machine, arrived in March 2013 as the last record of their RCA contract, and the band did no interviews, no photo shoots, no television and no tour to promote it.[1] [2] [3]

Comedown Machine reached number ten in both America and Britain, their weakest start since the first album. Rolling Stone's reviewer even wondered why it was a Strokes album rather than a Julian Casablancas solo record. Julian's creative energy was indeed moving elsewhere. In 2013 he formed a new experimental band, first called Julian Casablancas and the Voidz, and later simply the Voidz. Their debut, Tyranny, came out in 2014 on Cult Records and featured an eleven minute single, Human Sadness. The Strokes did not vanish, though. In 2014 they returned to American stages, and in June 2015 they headlined British Summer Time in London's Hyde Park.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The comeback and a Grammy

In June 2016 the band released a four track EP, Future Present Past, on Julian's own Cult Records, timed for a headline slot at the Governors Ball in New York. Its title mapped onto its three new songs, with Drag Queen as the future, Oblivius as the present and Threat of Joy as the past. In 2017 they played to a reported ninety thousand people at Lollapalooza Argentina, which Nikolai called their biggest show ever. That summer Albert's father told an interviewer the band were recording with Rick Rubin. Albert quickly posted that it was not true yet, and Julian joked that his bandmate's dad had got prematurely excited.[1] [2] [3]

In fact the band were working. Writing for the next album had started back in 2016, and they eventually recorded with Rick Rubin at his Shangri La studio in Malibu, with extra sessions around Los Angeles and in Hawaii. In May 2019 they launched what they called a global comeback at the Wiltern in Los Angeles, debuting The Adults Are Talking. The comeback had a bumpy start, with sound problems, rained out shows and whole festivals cancelled. At a New Year's Eve show at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, Julian announced a new album, joking that the band had taken the twenty tens off and had now been unfrozen.[1] [2] [3]

On the tenth of February 2020 the Strokes played a rally for Bernie Sanders at the University of New Hampshire, where Julian announced the album's title, The New Abnormal. It borrowed a phrase from California's former governor Jerry Brown, who had used it about the wildfires that threatened Malibu while they were recording. The cover used Bird on Money, a 1981 painting by Jean Michel Basquiat. The album came out on the tenth of April 2020, just as the pandemic shut the world down, which made the title feel eerily prescient. Many lyrics are thought to touch on Julian's divorce from Juliet Joslin, which had happened in 2019.[1] [2] [3]

Critics called The New Abnormal a return to form, praising Julian's more mature lyrics and a band that sounded like a band again. The closing song, Ode to the Mets, had been written after Julian watched his beloved New York Mets lose a playoff game in 2016. With touring impossible, the band played Saturday Night Live on Halloween 2020. Then, in March 2021, The New Abnormal won the Grammy for Best Rock Album. It was the band's first ever Grammy nomination, and their first win. Asked backstage about the state of rock and roll, Julian said people who called things dead had perhaps lost their imagination.[1] [2] [3]

The band returned to touring with gusto. In June 2022 a positive Covid test forced them to pull out of their headline slot at Primavera Sound in Barcelona at the last minute, and Tame Impala covered Last Nite in their honour. That summer and again in 2023 they opened stadium shows for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, reaching a new, younger audience. Albert said he felt he was in a bigger band than when everyone told him he was in a big band. Their story was also retold in Meet Me in the Bathroom, Lizzy Goodman's 2017 oral history, and in the 2022 documentary based on it, which the band did not take part in.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Reality Awaits and the story so far

In 2022 the band flew to the Guanacaste province of Costa Rica to record again with Rick Rubin. Rubin said they played outdoors on a mountain every day, like a concert for the ocean, and none of them wanted to leave. Further sessions followed at his California studios. In February 2023 they released The Singles Volume One, a box set of ten seven inch singles from their first three albums. In the autumn of 2025 they headlined both weekends of the Austin City Limits festival. Then, on the sixth of April 2026, they announced their seventh album, Reality Awaits, first mailing cassettes of the new song Going Shopping to one hundred fans.[1] [2]

Spring 2026 brought an unexpected line up change. After playing Coachella in April, Nick Valensi stepped away. On the fifteenth of May the band announced that Nick was taking a temporary break from the upcoming tour and that they looked forward to his return. In his place came Steve Schiltz, frontman of the band Longwave and an old friend from their early New York days. The band gave no detailed reason. Schiltz played through the Reality Awaits tour, which began with a headline set at Bonnaroo in June. After the tour wrapped in September, Nick turned up on stage in Los Angeles with Jack White, the man who had joined the Strokes at Radio City back in 2002.[1] [2] [3]

Reality Awaits was pushed back from late June and finally arrived on the twenty fourth of July 2026, released through RCA and Cult. It entered the American chart at number thirteen and the British chart at number eight. Reviews were mixed to positive. The Guardian called it the band's best album in years, a joyful marriage of Julian's weirder side projects with the Strokes' gift for simple pop. Rolling Stone was cooler, describing it as thrilling at times, often inscrutable and sometimes bizarre, and several critics disliked the heavy vocal processing. Alongside it the band released In Transit Part Two, a short film about the Costa Rica sessions and a nod to their 2001 tour film.[1] [2] [3]

Twenty five years after Is This It, the Strokes' place in history looks secure. NME named it the album of the decade for the two thousands, Rolling Stone ranked it second, and in 2025 Rolling Stone placed it tenth among the greatest albums of the twenty first century so far. Brandon Flowers of the Killers said hearing it made him throw away almost everything his band had written except Mr. Brightside. Alex Turner of Arctic Monkeys said he just wanted to be one of the Strokes. James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem called it his record of the decade. And as of 2026, The Adults Are Talking has matched Last Nite in streams, winning over a whole new generation.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Through all of it, the line up has never changed. The same five friends who met at school and in a boarding school in Switzerland are still the Strokes, even with Nick on a temporary break as of 2026. Julian leads the Voidz alongside the band, Albert has released five solo albums, Nikolai fronts Summer Moon, Fab makes art and music with his collective Machinegum, and Nick has his own band, CRX. Julian has admitted that he is now sick of Last Nite and would turn it off if it came on the radio. Luckily for everyone else, the crowds still sing every word.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

The people around The Strokes

Julian Casablancas and Albert Hammond Jr.. They met as young Americans at Le Rosey in Switzerland and reconnected in New York in 1998, sharing a flat within two weeks. Catherine Pierce, Albert's girlfriend at the time, said they loved each other and depended on each other's approval. Albert said things changed when they stopped living together. When Julian heard Albert was being given heroin, he threatened the person he held responsible, which he later described as stepping in to protect a friend.[1] [2] [3]

Julian Casablancas and Nikolai Fraiture. The band's longest friendship began when they were six, at the Lycée Français de New York. When a water main burst and Nikolai had nowhere to go, Julian took him home, and he stayed for three days. Nikolai later got his first bass as a graduation present from his grandfather, gave it to Julian, and only started playing it himself two years later.[1] [2]

Fabrizio Moretti and Drew Barrymore. Fab began dating the actress Drew Barrymore in 2002 after they met at a concert, and they became one of the most photographed couples of the era. In 2003 he planned his evening around watching her on the Tonight Show. They planned a VH1 music video series together that was never made. The relationship ended in January 2007.[1] [2] [3]

Nick Valensi and Amanda de Cadenet. Nick married the English photographer and television presenter Amanda de Cadenet in the summer of 2006, after four years together. They had twins, Silvan and Ella, that same year, and Nick also became stepfather to her daughter Atlanta. De Cadenet photographed the band and called Nick her muse. Nick missed some of Albert's early solo shows because he was looking after his newborn twins.[1] [2] [3]

Julian Casablancas and Juliet Joslin. Juliet Joslin was the Strokes' assistant manager when she married Julian in 2005. Their son Cal was born in January 2010 and their second son, Zephyr, in March 2015, and the family spent time in upstate New York and California. The couple divorced in 2019, and critics heard echoes of the split in the lyrics of The New Abnormal.[1] [2]

The Strokes and Ryan Gentles. Ryan Gentles was a young booker at the Mercury Lounge who gave the band four shows in December 2000, sent their demo to Rough Trade and quit his job to manage them. He even starred in their video for The End Has No End. He also briefly managed Ryan Adams, until the band invoked a contract clause and insisted he stop.[1] [2] [3]

The Strokes and Gordon Raphael. The Seattle born producer spotted the band at the Luna Lounge and recorded their demo in his East Village basement for six hundred dollars. He produced Is This It and Room on Fire, and was replaced by David Kahne after nearly a year on the third album. In 2022 he published a memoir about his years with the band.[1] [2]

The Strokes and Ryan Adams. The singer Ryan Adams was part of the band's circle in the early two thousands. Several people in Meet Me in the Bathroom described him as a bad influence on Albert, a claim Adams strongly denies. He said the band summoned him to a bar, lectured him and told him he was no longer welcome. In 2017 he attacked them on Twitter before deleting the posts.[1] [2]

The Strokes and The Killers. Brandon Flowers said hearing Is This It depressed him so much that the Killers threw out almost everything they had, keeping only Mr. Brightside. He later admitted the Strokes' debut was better than the Killers' own first album. Nick Valensi, for his part, confessed the Strokes wondered why Mr. Brightside was the song everyone was listening to.[1] [2]

Julian Casablancas and Daft Punk. The French duo were fans of the Strokes and met Julian through the director Warren Fu while working on the Tron Legacy soundtrack. He combined two of their demos into Instant Crush, writing and singing it and playing the guitar solo. He shared in the Album of the Year Grammy for Random Access Memories, and a second song from those sessions finally appeared in 2023 with the Voidz.[1] [2] [3]

Julian Casablancas and John Casablancas. Julian's father founded Elite Model Management and was credited with inventing the supermodel, but his personal life drew heavy criticism over his relationships with very young models. Julian never lived with him after his parents split, yet has refused to speak badly of him, saying they got on great. John Casablancas died in Rio de Janeiro in July 2013, aged seventy.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Strokes and Rick Rubin. Rick Rubin met the band in 2017, just to feel out the vibe, according to Albert. He went on to produce The New Abnormal at his Shangri La studio, winning them their first Grammy, and then took them to Costa Rica to record Reality Awaits. Rubin called the outdoor Costa Rica sessions the best experience.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about The Strokes

• In the early days Albert posed as the band's manager, using the fake name Paul Spencer. Before Ryan Gentles took over, Albert Hammond Junior booked shows and pestered record executives while pretending to be the band's manager. He used the name Paul Spencer, borrowed from an old fake ID.[1] [2]
• Albert says he converted to Judaism so Nick would not be the only Jewish member. Albert was baptised Episcopalian. He told Rolling Stone in 2003 that he had informally converted to Judaism so that Nick Valensi would not be the only Jew in the band.[1] [2]
• Before their very first gig, the band calmed their nerves by watching the comedy Bowfinger. Albert remembers the band being so nervous before their first show that they went to see the Eddie Murphy film Bowfinger. The audience turned out to be about six people, all of them friends.[1]
• The demo that launched the Strokes cost six hundred dollars for three days of recording. Gordon Raphael offered the band a three day deal for six hundred dollars in his basement studio. He thought the three songs were fine but put them in a folder with hundreds of other recordings and moved on.[1] [2]
• Julian asked his producer to make one song loosen its tie a little. Gordon Raphael called Julian a master of the cryptic instruction. Julian once asked if a song could loosen its tie a little, and wanted his voice to sound like a favourite worn in pair of jeans.[1]
• Julian sang much of Is This It through a small practice amplifier. To keep a lo fi edge, Julian sang through a small Peavey practice amp while the band played to a click track. The drums were recorded with just three microphones.[1]
• The album title Is This It deliberately has no question mark. The band left out the grammatically correct question mark because it did not look right to them.[1]
• The American Is This It cover image had appeared on earlier albums, including one by Prince. The bubble chamber photograph used in America first appeared on the new age musician Bruce Becvar's 1988 album The Nature of Things, and part of it showed up on Prince's 1990 album Graffiti Bridge.[1]
• The model on the Is This It cover has never been publicly identified. Photographer Colin Lane shot it on a cheap Big Shot Polaroid with a Chanel glove left over from a fashion shoot. He says the model, his girlfriend at the time, has never been named because that was her decision.[1]
• Colin Lane met the band on his first commission for The Face and later shot Julian's wedding. Lane first photographed the Strokes in January 2001, then took them to a rooftop fifty five storeys up near Grand Central. He toured with them until 2006 and photographed Julian Casablancas's wedding.[1]
• Is This It was released first in Australia, not America or Britain. The album came out in Australia on the thirtieth of July 2001, timed to a tour supporting You Am I. An export ban stopped copies leaking to other countries.[1]
• The American vinyl of Is This It kept New York City Cops because it was released on September eleventh. The CD was delayed and the song replaced, but the American vinyl pressing had already been scheduled for the eleventh of September 2001, so it kept the original track list.[1]
• The band reportedly turned down six hundred thousand dollars from Heineken. RCA's former marketing chief remembered Heineken offering around six hundred thousand dollars to use one of their early singles, probably Last Nite. The band said no.[1]
• Albert's father's song credit appears on Radiohead's Creep. Albert Hammond senior co-wrote the Hollies hit The Air That I Breathe. Because of its resemblance, Radiohead's Creep carries a songwriting credit for him.[1] [2]
• A seventeen year old Alex Turner saw the Strokes at Alexandra Palace in 2003. The future Arctic Monkeys singer was in the crowd in December 2003 and, by chance, had his picture taken with Pete Doherty that night.[1]
• Julian held up a single release because of the credit on a duet with Regina Spektor. The Reptilia single was slightly delayed when Julian objected to the B side being credited to the Strokes and Regina Spektor. He insisted her name should come first.[1]
• The Someday video pits the Strokes against Guided by Voices on Family Feud. Roman Coppola's video features Slash, Duff McKagan and Matt Sorum, along with Richard Karn as host of a fictional game of Family Feud.[1]
• The band's manager plays the lead in The End Has No End video. Sophie Muller's video stars Ryan Gentles, alongside Mila Kunis and Eva Mendes, and nods to Stanley Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey.[1]
• Juicebox is the Strokes' only song ever to reach the Billboard Hot 100. The leaked single scraped in at number ninety eight, but it topped the component sales chart that week.[1]
• Nick's favourite guitar was a gift from Albert. Nick's main guitar is a 1995 Epiphone Riviera with Gibson pickups that Albert gave him. Nick called it the greatest guitar never made, and Epiphone later built a signature model.[1]
• Albert holds his guitar high like Buddy Holly so he can dance. Albert plays with his Stratocaster up high on his chest, a style he says lets him dance better on stage.[1]
• In 2010 the Strokes played a secret London show under the name Venison. On the ninth of June 2010 they played Dingwalls in Camden to four hundred and eighty seven people, their first gig since October 2006.[1]
• In 2003 Julian owned only three CDs and no phone, computer or watch. Rolling Stone found that Julian's collection consisted of two discs from a Bob Marley box set and a Johnny Cash compilation. He did not own a cell phone, a computer or a watch.[1]
• Julian once offered the Mets' TV network new theme music for free. A lifelong New York Mets fan, Julian composed theme music for the channel SNY and offered it at no charge. He wrote Ode to the Mets after a 2016 playoff defeat, while waiting for the subway home.[1] [2]
• In The Adults Are Talking video, the Strokes lose a baseball game to robots fifty six to one. Roman Coppola directed the video, in which the band play baseball against highly skilled robots, with Beck as a base coach. They celebrate their single run as if they had won.[1]
• Bad Decisions borrows its chorus melody from Billy Idol's old band Generation X. The chorus uses the melody of Dancing with Myself, and Eternal Summer borrows from the Psychedelic Furs, so both songs credit the original writers.[1]
• Fab Moretti once staged a Sotheby's exhibition with an art dealer also named Fabrizio Moretti. In December 2019 the drummer and his namesake, an Italian Old Masters dealer, presented a joint show in New York called Fabrizio Moretti x Fabrizio Moretti In Passing.[1]
• When Covid cancelled their Primavera set, Tame Impala covered Last Nite for them. The Strokes pulled out of Primavera Sound in 2022 at the last minute because of a Covid infection, and Tame Impala played Last Nite in tribute.[1]
• Nikolai gave away his first bass to Julian. He received the bass at sixteen as a graduation gift from his grandfather, handed it to Julian, and did not take up the instrument again for two years.[1]
• RCA's talent scout was finally won over by listening through a window. Steve Ralbovsky arrived late to a sold out Bowery Ballroom show and heard the band through a window by the subway steps. It impressed him more than seeing them inside.[1]
• Reality Awaits was announced by mailing cassettes to one hundred fans. On the day of the announcement in April 2026, fans who had signed up to the band's text service received cassettes of Going Shopping in the post.[1]
• Julian co-owns a Grammy for Album of the Year thanks to Daft Punk. Because he wrote and sang Instant Crush, Julian was among the credited recipients when Random Access Memories won Album of the Year.[1] [2]
• Julian says he is sick of Last Nite and would turn it off on the radio. In 2024 he told the Guardian that Last Nite was pretty dead to him, though he was less tired of other favourites like Reptilia and Someday.[1]
• Albert's 2018 solo album was inspired by his twin, lost before birth. Francis Trouble was inspired by a twin who died in a miscarriage before either of them was born.[1]
• Fab studied sculpture before dropping out to drum full time. After high school Moretti studied sculpture at SUNY New Paltz, then left to focus on the Strokes. He has kept making art, including a nine foot mirrored installation in 2021.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.