YMMV / The Strokes

• Anvilicious: "Eternal Summer" from The New Abnormal has Casablancas draw upon his work on The Voidz to deliver an environmental message regarding global warming.
• Awesome Music:
  • Is This It. The whole album, no discussion.
  • Room on Fire, First Impressions of Earth and The New Abnormal may qualify as well, depending on where you set the bar for the quality of the band's music.
  • Angles reaches this point for some, who comment that while the band set off in a different direction, the album still has many pearls among the tracks and the feel of a Strokes album.
    • Even the album's detractors found "Life is Simple in The Moonlight" to be one of their best songs in a while. Which leads to a What Could Have Been, depending on how you feel about the album: "Life is Simple" was the only song to survive the band's recording sessions with Angles' original producer, who they felt was taking the album in the wrong direction.
• Broken Base: Given how there can't even be a decision as to where the band started to falter in their sound quality, this is to be expected. Comedown Machine, however, is generally agreed to be their worst- though whether it's actually bad or just not as good as the others is a subject of debate. Being mostly a disco album by Casablancas rather than a Strokes album didn't help.
• Epic Riff: "Last Nite", among many others.
• First Installment Wins: Is This It is still their best-known, best-reviewed, and best-liked album.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: They were always more popular in the UK than in their native US, especially when they released Is This It.
• Never Live It Down/Funny Moments: Nikolai broke the zooooooooommm.
• Signature Song: It's changed a few times over the years, but most will tell you it’s "Someday”, “Last Nite", or “Reptilia”.
  • For fans of the band, the most common answer is likely “Hard to Explain”.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The bassline to "Juicebox" is very similar to the theme song from Spy Hunter and Peter Gunn, to the point that the band gave Henry Mancini a 10% writing credit.
• Tear Jerker: Not particularly common in the band's output, but Angles gives us "Call Me Back" and "Life is Simple in The Moonlight", and The New Abnormal gave us "At the Door" and "Brooklyn Bridge to Chorus". Also worth mentioning is the final track of Comedown Machine, "Call It Fate, Call It Karma".
• Vindicated by History: Their sketchily-received third album, First Impressions of Earth got better received by people as time went by and the band released newer albums.
  • As of late, Angles is starting to get this treatment as well.
• Win Back the Crowd: Their sixth LP, The New Abnormal, has been warmly received by critics and fans alike, being considered a return to form for the band, with the experimentation that the band made in the previous decade finally paying off in a full length album.

---