21 years of Is This It – Strokes’ first album comes of age

21 years ago the The Strokes released their first album Is This It(2001), cwith the singles “Hard to Explain”, “Last Nite”,“someday” and “New York City Cops”the band rose to prominence by mixing Indie Rock, Punk and Garage Rock.

Is This It had high repercussion in the year of its release and is the group’s most successful work. With more than 2 million copies sold worldwide, it is considered as the record that “saved rock.”

At the time, the aim of The Strokes was for the album to sound unpretentious and ‘dirty’ and they were inspired by bands like Velvet Underground and Ramones using just three mics on the drums to capture “an explosive sound”.

Even the band fired the producer Gil Nortonresponsible for producing the pixies for finding the result “too pretentious” and called Gordon Raphael, responsible for the band’s first demo to resume the post (via NME). The Strokes gained critical acclaim and commercial attention.

Front cover

The album cover image, which shows a photo of a naked woman’s body wearing a glove resting on her hip, was spontaneously taken by photographer Colin Lane as his ex-girlfriend came out of the shower.

In the United States, the cover was changed to another one with a photo of subatomic particles and, according to businessmen from the strokeswas a decision by the band itself, including an alleged declaration of Julian Casablancas who, on the phone, would have said that “he thought it was a much cooler image than the butt picture” for the album cover. (via TMDQA)