The Strokes - Is This It

At the turn of the millennium, guitar rock was supposed to be finished. Then five kids from New York put out Is This It and reset the clock. Released in 2001, the debut album from The Strokes reignited a genre and drew the blueprint for a decade of indie bands chasing the same lean, wiry cool. Almost none of them caught it.

Everything here is economy and attitude. Across eleven songs, Julian Casablancas and company distill garage rock and post-punk down to their sharpest essentials, all clipped guitars, deadpan vocals, and hooks delivered with studied nonchalance. "The Modern Age" and "Hard to Explain" announced the band's arrival, "Last Nite" became the ubiquitous anthem that broke them worldwide, and the ragged "New York City Cops" gave the record its adrenaline. The whole thing runs barely half an hour and never wastes a second of it.

More than twenty years on, Is This It remains a permanent fixture on greatest-albums-of-all-time lists and one of the most influential debuts of the century, the record every subsequent guitar band has had to measure itself against. It still sounds effortless, timeless, and faintly untouchable.

This is the US LP pressing on RCA, cut at Sterling Sound. Notably, the vinyl retains the original tracklist including "New York City Cops," the song famously pulled from the US CD in the wake of September 11. A definitive pressing of a modern classic, and the way this record was always meant to be heard.