In the summer of 2001, The Strokes released "Is This It" and effectively reset what a rock record was allowed to sound like. A year later, Interpol answered with "Turn on the Bright Lights," and the two albums have been paired ever since, as though they were made in the same room by people who agreed on everything. They were not. The two records share a city and a moment, and almost nothing else, and that tension is what makes them worth sitting with together.
The Strokes recorded "Is This It" with producer Gordon Raphael at Transporterraum, a basement studio in Manhattan's East Village, during March and April of 2001. The band, Julian Casablancas on vocals, Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr. on guitars, Nikolai Fraiture on bass, and Fabrizio Moretti on drums, had been playing the same songs in small rooms for years. Raphael's approach was to keep the sound as close to that live experience as possible. No heavy studio effects, no layering for its own sake. Distortion and reverse echo, used sparingly. The result was an album that sounded like it had been recorded in a hurry by people who knew exactly what they were doing.
The album first appeared in Australia on July 30, 2001, then in the UK on August 27, timed to coincide with the band's appearance at Reading and Leeds. The US release, originally scheduled for September 25, was pushed to October 9 after the September 11 attacks. The US CD also replaced "New York City Cops" with a newly recorded track, "When It Started," a decision the band made after witnessing the response of the city's police department during the tragedy. The vinyl edition, pressed before the attacks, retained the original tracklist. The album opens with the title track, "Is This It," a slow-burning, almost hesitant piece that sets the record's temperature before "The Modern Age" arrives and raises it. Three singles came from the album: "Hard to Explain," "Last Nite," and "Someday." In the UK, "Is This It" reached number two on the Albums Chart. In the US, it peaked at number 33 on the Billboard 200, a number that tells you something about how the American market received it at the time.
Interpol's "Turn on the Bright Lights" was made in a different kind of room entirely. The band, Paul Banks on vocals and guitar, Daniel Kessler on guitar, Carlos Dengler on bass and keyboards, and Sam Fogarino on drums, drove out of New York to record with producer Peter Katis at Tarquin Studios in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in November 2001. Gareth Jones, whose credits include work with Depeche Mode, assisted Katis with mixing. The sessions were tense. Dengler later noted that the album's songs had been written before September 11, but that the attacks gave the material an unintentional weight it had not carried before. The distance from the city was deliberate. Getting the band out of New York meant getting them away from the distractions that came with it.
The album opens with "Untitled," a track that guitarist Daniel Kessler has said was written specifically to open the band's live shows. It begins slowly and builds, which is a fair description of the record as a whole. The tracklist runs through "Obstacle 1," "NYC," "PDA," "Say Hello to the Angels," "Hands Away," "Obstacle 2," "Stella Was a Diver and She Was Always Down," "Roland," "The New," and closes with "Leif Erikson." The singles were "PDA," "Obstacle 1," and a double A-side pairing "Say Hello to the Angels" with "NYC." The album's title comes from a recurring lyric in "NYC." Released on Matador Records on August 19, 2002 in the UK and August 20 in the US, it reached number 101 on the UK Albums Chart and number 158 on the Billboard 200. Those numbers suggest modest commercial reach, but the album spent 73 weeks on the Billboard Independent Albums chart, peaking at number five, and Pitchfork named it the best album of 2002.
The contrast between the two records is not just sonic. "Is This It" is a record about being young in a city, about the small dramas of relationships and late nights, delivered with a looseness that sounds effortless even when it is not. Casablancas wrote lyrics that described the lives of urban youth in plain language, and Raphael's production kept everything close and immediate. "Turn on the Bright Lights" is a record about mood as much as subject matter. Banks's baritone sits in the mix like a weather system, and Dengler's bass lines do much of the emotional work. Where The Strokes sound like they are playing in the room with you, Interpol sound like they are playing in a room you are watching through glass.
Both albums arrived during a period when the New York scene was generating more press attention than it could reasonably sustain. The Strokes signed to RCA after a bidding war. Interpol chose Matador, the independent label that had helped define 1990s indie rock. The difference in label choices reflects something real about the two bands' positions within the same moment. The Strokes were the ones the mainstream press had decided to love first. Interpol built their audience more slowly, through the kind of word-of-mouth that tends to produce more durable loyalty.
What the two albums share is a seriousness of purpose that was not especially fashionable in 2001 and 2002. Both bands had been playing together long enough to know what they wanted, and both found producers who understood how to get it on tape without smoothing out the edges that made the music interesting. Raphael's basement studio and Katis's Connecticut house are very different places, and the records they produced there sound like it. That is the point. New York gave both bands their subject matter and their audience. The studios where the music was actually made were somewhere else entirely.
