Julian Casablancas has admitted that pressure to keep the Strokes together for financial reasons forced the band’s creativity “into the background”.
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The New York band haven’t released any music together since dropping their sixth and latest album, ‘The New Abnormal’, in early 2020, but Casablancas has since released music with The Voidz, including last year’s ‘Like All Before You’ and recent EP ‘MęĞż øF rÅm’.
In a new interview with Rolling Stone Italia, he was asked why he chose to leave the Strokes behind in favour of recording with The Voidz. “When I started making music, becoming passionate about my dreams and vision, I had a very clear idea of how I wanted things to evolve,” he said.
“My journey with the Strokes became something different from what initially attracted me to music.” He cited legacy bands like Bon Jovi and Green Day as evidence they could have “gone on forever” – and shed some light about how sensing that affected their output.
“We had entered a mechanism that kept us together solely for financial reasons, pushing the band’s creativity into the background,” Casablancas explained. “So I came to the conclusion that wasn’t the way I wanted to develop.
“There’s a beautiful Miles Davis quote: ‘The real risk is not changing.’ That’s why I always want to feel like I’m searching for something unexplored. If I make money, that’s fine, but I don’t want to stay still. I’m not looking for security or the status quo. If someone wants to keep creating, they have to be ready for change. Even if it means the death of something they held dear.”
Casablancas has often expressed his dismay at performing popular Strokes songs live, admitting that he became “sick” of playing old hits live, saying “the music doesn’t move you” when playing the same tracks repeatedly in 2020.
He added at the time: “When you’re growing up and imagining playing music, it is for the excitement, but the one aspect of doing it for a living that is a sadness you don’t anticipate is that you play songs so much, you become sick of them.
“We hadn’t played for a while. So it was still fun, but when you start playing 30 or 40 shows, the music doesn’t move you. You feel phoney. To some extent, that’s why I play with The Voidz. I couldn’t care less about playing ‘Last Nite.’”
Similarly, he opened up about why he had “kind of stepped away a little bit” from The Strokes to focus on The Voidz last autumn.
“But it’s a very cool day job that I’m honoured to have, so I don’t feel negatively about it,” the singer said. “If it was wasting so much of my time that I couldn’t do anything positive, then I would. But I don’t let it get to that point. At least I don’t think so. I could be lying to myself.”
Back in 2022, Rick Rubin – who produced ‘The New Abnormal’ – revealed that he was working on a new album with The Strokes, and had finished a recording session with them in Costa Rica. “It was incredible,” he remembered. “And we did that every day, playing out in the [open], and they didn’t want to leave. It was, like, the best experience.”
During an interview with NME in spring 2023, guitarist Albert Hammond Jr gave an update on the progress of The Strokes’ next full-length project.
“I think [Rubin] was just so excited about where we recorded,” Hammond Jr said of the producer’s revelation from the previous year. “But I don’t know what to say about it – I don’t have any information on it.
“It’s not like it’s happening and I’m hiding something. We went and did a bunch of recording. It could come out a year or two years from now – it’s an unknown amount of time when it’ll be finished but, yes, we are working on another record.”
Earlier this week, The Strokes announced two warm up shows ahead of their forthcoming Austin City Limits headline slot, which marks their first confirmed live performances together in 2025.
This year’s edition of the Texas festival is due to take place on two consecutive weekends: October 3-5 and October 10-12. Three-day tickets for both editions are on sale now – buy yours here.
As a warm up, they’ll perform two intimate shows at The Chelsea at the Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas on September 27 and the Abraham Chavez Theatre in El Paso on October 1. You can find tickets here.
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