The Strokes

With the release of their almost universally loathed sixth album Reality Awaits, hit-makers The Strokes, who in previous decades had made their name for surefire head-bopping, all killer no filler anthems, seemed to forget that music is fundamentally entertainment, and entertainment is about having fun. With their live show, they remember that at last.

Neither of the above sentiments is totally true. When artists are known for being introspective and lyrically profound from the start, the fun is quite rightly only occasionally felt in the music, but The Strokes were never that kind of band. They came from New York and they came to England to be loud. For that reason, they made their big break over here, where they had flopped in the states. As for that live show of such great acclaim, when they perform the bangers, it rocks.

As Radio 1 breakfast show presenter Greg James, who attended this same Manchester show, said: "Soma and Someday were practically biblical experiences". The passion in the crowd is unmatched. The guitar work is jaw-dropping and virtuosic. Julian Casablancas looks like someone has reminded him why he fell in love with the job. But then the new songs play. Grizzly and auto-tuned, pretentious and totally devoid of choruses or emotion or meaning, these supposed "songs from the future" come across as art school fodder produced by a duster jacket and sunglasses combo Casablancas impersonator, not the first album following a six year hiatus from one of the biggest indie rock bands of all time. The hope was these songs would fare better in a live environment, as these things often do. Unfortunately, contextualised around the boot-stamping classics that make up the vast majority of the set, they make even less sense. Lots of people drift off to the toilets when the new songs are being performed, and even Julian delivers such gusto even he must be tempted by the prospect of a quick slash.

Loose stragglers of fans who enjoyed Reality Awaits will rejoice in the first support act, Alex Cameron, whose regular bongo intervals and comparisons between Jesus Christ and worldwide epidemics match the level of radical pretension showcased on the latest Strokes release. Julian has, admittedly, always flirted with vocal distortion, even on Is This It?, but more especially on his side-hustling three albums with The Voidz and appearance on Charli XCX's Brat remixes with Mean Girls. The vocoder is far from the least egregious part. The production is otherwise pretty sublime. As for the songwriting...well, this seems like a column to rant about all the things The Strokes have done wrong but frankly, they got a lot right at their first Manchester show in twenty years. You understand why they were once so famed, and ended up going viral once more with Gen Z and the Tiktokers in 2020, when Lonely in the Future shifts into Hard to Explain. Because of this viral moment, the crowd is split between fans of my generation, who first discovered them over the past few years, with the original, now middle-aged die hards. Pure divine brilliance. Honourable mention too to the second support, The Fat White Family, who with their ska-and-The-Fall-fused noise (noise, being the best way to describe them, with the rather tinny set-up that precedes the immaculate Strokes performance) gets the crowd all warmed up.

There are also not just one but two encores, which is practically unheard of, so we left in between them. Meaning, if you do keep chanting "One More Song", your favourite band might just never leave…

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