In March 2001, The Strokes walked into Transporterraum, Gordon Raphael's basement studio in New York's East Village, and spent the next two months recording their debut album. The resulting record, Is This It, was voted the number one album of 2001 by Billboard, CMJ, NME, Time, and Entertainment Weekly. The more interesting story, though, is what the band was so deliberately pushing against when they made it.
The sessions almost went a different direction entirely. After signing with RCA, The Strokes tried working with Gil Norton, who had produced Pixies and Foo Fighters records, and scrapped those sessions because the output sounded, in the band's own words, too clean and too pretentious. Too much like a band being prepared for something. When they brought in Raphael, whom they had first encountered at the Luna Lounge in August 2000, where he handed Albert Hammond Jr. a business card after the show, they found someone whose instincts matched theirs. Julian Casablancas wanted the record to sound like a band from the past that had taken a time trip into the future to make their album. That is not a throwaway idea. It is a production philosophy, and you can hear it in every compressed guitar tone and every vocal that sits slightly too close in the mix.
Raphael's Transporterraum was a live room roughly 25 feet square with 12-foot ceilings and homemade acoustic treatment. It was not a prestige environment. Someone at RCA heard an early cut and reportedly told people that Raphael was ruining Julian's voice and killing any chance the band had of a career. The band kept going anyway. What they were building, with Julian Casablancas on vocals, Albert Hammond Jr. and Nick Valensi trading guitar parts, Nikolai Fraiture on bass, and Fabrizio Moretti on drums, was a record that sounded like it had been found rather than constructed. The compositions were shaped largely through live takes. The point was to capture something that felt like it already existed, somewhere in the East Village's lineage of Velvet Underground records and CBGB nights, and just hadn't been documented yet.
The album opens with the title track, which barely announces itself, Casablancas half-mumbling over a riff that unspools at its own pace. Then "The Modern Age" locks in and the whole thing accelerates. By "Last Nite" and "Hard to Explain," released as the lead single on June 25, 2001, the record had established a sound that felt genuinely specific to a place and a time: New York at the turn of the millennium, young, a little broke, a little bored, not especially interested in performing ambition. The closing track, "Take It or Leave It," doesn't so much end the album as run out of things to say and stop.
Then September 11 happened, and the album's American release was pushed back to October 9. The original tracklist included "New York City Cops," a song with a lyric that read as a provocation in a city that was, in the weeks after the towers fell, treating its police department as sacred. The band replaced it on the US CD pressing with "When It Started," recorded that September at Transporterraum. The vinyl kept the original sequence. The result was two versions of the same album, one that most Americans heard and one that the rest of the world had already absorbed. It is a strange footnote, but it fits: Is This It arrived in its home city already slightly altered by the city itself.
What the album captured, and what made it matter to everyone who reached for a guitar in the years after, was a particular quality of restraint. The songs trusted their own weight. Raphael's production kept everything close and slightly worn. The guitars on "Someday" and "Alone, Together" don't shimmer; they sit. Casablancas doesn't project; he addresses. The whole record has the texture of something overheard rather than performed. In 2001, when the dominant modes in alternative music were either stadium-scaled nu-metal or the kind of indie that confused sincerity with shapelessness, that texture was genuinely startling. The Strokes hadn't invented a new sound. They had recovered an old one and recorded it in a basement, and that turned out to be exactly enough.
