For Fans of The Strokes

Thirty-three minutes. Eleven tracks. No filler. Is This It did something almost impossible for a debut: it arrived fully formed, with nothing to prove and nowhere to hide. The riffs are borrowed from no one you can quite name; the production is clean enough to hear every note and rough enough to feel like a rehearsal room. What Casablancas was singing about barely mattered next to the conviction with which he sang it. Two decades on, it still sounds exactly as effortless as it did the first time, which is to say it sounds like it cost no effort at all and obviously cost everything.

Lizzy Goodman's oral history Meet Me in the Bathroom covers roughly the same years the early Strokes albums do, and it works as an authorized soundtrack to the moment: the Bowery, the Mercury Lounge, the particular way that small rooms and big ambition combined around 2001-2004. It is gossip, mythology, and scene-building all at once. Read it while listening to Is This It and Turn on the Bright Lights and you will feel like you were there, which is the best any book about a scene can do.

Mick Jagger and Martin Scorsese's HBO series Vinyl is set in the 1970s New York that fed directly into the DNA of bands like The Strokes: the lofts, the A&R hustle, the violent creative collision of punk and disco. It is excessive, sometimes chaotic, and sonically faithful in a way that matters. For fans who want to understand why the Strokes idolized Television, Lou Reed, and the Velvet Underground, Vinyl provides context with the volume up.

Nineteen years after Is This It, The New Abnormal arrived and reminded everyone that the Strokes were never just a nostalgia act. Rick Rubin's production gave the record space and warmth; the melodies were looser, more melancholy; Casablancas sounded like a man looking back without regret. It is not the debut and it does not try to be. That it found new listeners who had not been born when the band formed is the kind of longevity most artists spend entire careers chasing.