Julian Casablancas walked into Gordon Raphael's Transporterraum studio in early 2001 and told the producer he wanted the album to sound like you had taken a time machine into the future and found a classic record from way in the past that you really liked. That instruction is either the most useful brief ever given in a recording session or the most pretentious, depending on your mood. Either way, it worked. "Last Nite" landed on October 23, 2001, as the second single from *Is This It*, and a significant portion of its listeners had the same quiet, slightly disorienting experience: the feeling that they already knew it. That feeling was not accidental. It was the whole design.
The Strokes, formed in New York City in 1998, were Julian Casablancas on vocals, Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr. on guitars, Nikolai Fraiture on bass, and Fabrizio Moretti on drums. They had already scrapped an earlier set of sessions with producer Gil Norton, the man behind the Pixies' *Doolittle*, because the results sounded, in the band's own assessment, "too pretentious." Raphael was a different proposition entirely: a basement-studio producer they'd met at one of their own shows. The entire album was tracked at Raphael's Transporterraum in New York City during March and April 2001, and Casablancas pushed for live, minimal takes to preserve the rawness of the performances. The label, when they visited the sessions, told Raphael the recordings sounded unprofessional. They were, in their way, describing exactly what made the album work.
The guitar riff that opens "Last Nite" is close enough to Tom Petty's "American Girl" that listeners noticed immediately, and Casablancas' response when asked about it was as economical as his recording philosophy: "Yeah, we ripped it off. Where you been?" Petty, for his part, was unbothered. Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2006, he said, "That made me laugh out loud. I was like, 'OK, good for you.' It doesn't bother me." The Strokes even opened for Petty on several dates of his 2006 tour, which is a kind of absolution you don't usually get to collect in person. The guitar solo on "Last Nite," meanwhile, was inspired by Freddie King. The song is, in other words, a deliberate collage of things that already existed, assembled so fluently that it feels like one thing.
That quality of familiar-but-new is what gave "Last Nite" its particular grip on the moment. The *Is This It* album had its US release rescheduled to October 9, 2001, in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The city the Strokes were singing about had just become a different city. And yet the album, and "Last Nite" specifically, found its audience fast. The single reached the top five on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart and number 14 on the UK Singles Chart. The band had already built considerable momentum after Rough Trade released their three-song *The Modern Age* EP in January 2001, and a major label bidding war followed. RCA won, and by the time "Last Nite" arrived as a proper single, the machinery of hype was already at full speed. The song didn't need the hype. It had that opening riff.
What the song actually did, culturally, was give a generation of listeners permission to care about guitar music again in a way that felt earned. Rock radio in 2001 was not short of guitars, but it was short of this particular texture: Fabrizio Moretti's drums sitting right up front and slightly dry, Nikolai Fraiture's bass holding the low end with quiet steadiness, and Casablancas' vocal processed to sit just behind the surface of the mix. The band had been playing the Lower East Side long enough that the song felt like it had already lived somewhere before it was recorded. That lived-in quality, the sense that you were hearing something rediscovered rather than invented, was the trick at the center of "Last Nite," and it's why the song has held.
More than two decades on, the song remains the most-streamed entry in the Strokes' catalog on the major DSPs, a position that usually belongs to songs with big choruses or cultural-event status, songs attached to a film or a moment that people keep returning to. "Last Nite" has none of that scaffolding. It's 3 minutes and 13 seconds of a band playing with the lights slightly dimmed, sounding like something you half-remember from a party in an apartment you can't quite place. Casablancas told Raphael he wanted a time-trip. What he got was a song that makes the listener feel like the one doing the traveling.
