Into The Music
On March 31, The Strokes did something they rarely do: they communicated directly with fans, and they were deliberately mysterious about it. The band posted a link to a Laylo page on their Instagram Stories, complete with a retro 1990s-style notepad icon and artwork depicting four horses dragging a cassette tape across a desert. Users who signed up with their phone number received a text message that read, simply, “try to share something soon.” The band’s official website was updated to point to the same page, with the title “????”
That is not nothing. For a band that has spent the better part of six years in various states of hibernation while its members pursued solo work, this is an unusually coordinated nudge in the direction of something new.
The timing matters. The Strokes are due back on stage in San Francisco later this month before headlining Coachella 2026. Those dates were announced without any new music attached, which felt a little hollow, even for a band as beloved as this one. Festival crowds can sustain the old catalog for a night, but there is a difference between a band cashing in on legacy and a band that still has something to say. The cassette tape teaser, however minor, suggests the latter is at least on the table.
The most recent Strokes album was The New Abnormal, released in April 2020. It landed quietly into a locked-down world and was, by most accounts, the band’s strongest work in years. Rick Rubin produced it, and the recording sessions sounded like something the band actually wanted to do rather than an obligation. Rubin later confirmed he had flown to Costa Rica with the band and spent more time with them in the studio. Julian Casablancas described the experience as a productive one, while also cautioning fans that any new record was “extremely v far off” from completion. That was in 2022.
Three years is a long time, and the band has been quiet about where things stand. Albert Hammond Jr. has released solo material. Casablancas has stayed active with The Voidz. But the Laylo campaign, whatever it eventually reveals, reads like a band in coordination mode, which is something different entirely from the ambient drift of the past few years.
Whether this resolves into a single, a full album, or some limited pre-Coachella surprise is not yet clear. But the effort alone, the imagery, the campaign, the pointed mysteriousness of “we’ll be in touch,” indicates that The Strokes are not just showing up to festivals on name recognition. They appear to be building toward something. That is worth paying attention to.
I’ll believe it when I hear it, honestly. The Strokes have been ‘teasing’ and ‘hinting’ for the better part of a decade now and the gap between their mystique and their actual output keeps widening. Mysterious posts and deleted links are easy. Records are hard. That said, if they’ve genuinely got something worth releasing, good luck to them , First Impressions of Earth proved they had more range than people gave them credit for.
Carlos, the East LA point is real and I appreciate you saying it. There’s a whole conversation about how certain New York bands got to claim a cool that was built on the backs of scenes that never got the same magazine coverage, the same label budgets, the same critical framing. The Strokes are good musicians but the mythology around them was always also about access, about which zip codes got taken seriously. That’s not The Strokes’ fault exactly, but it’s part of the story we should be telling alongside the new music teases.
People treat The Strokes like they invented cool rock music but if you grew up on the East LA sound , the real guitar bands, the bands that actually lived the life before they had label money , the Strokes always felt a little too polished to me. Deliberately messy isn’t the same as actually messy. New music could change my mind but I’m not holding my breath.
I’m genuinely baffled by the level of anticipation every time The Strokes sneeze in public. No shade to anyone who loves them but the music press treats this band like they’re guarding some sacred flame. Meanwhile actual artists are putting out full projects quarterly with zero hype because they don’t have the right cosign. The article even admits the mystique outpaces the actual output. That’s a wrap for me.
I came to The Strokes through my nephew, who played me Is This It about five years ago, and I thought , oh, this is like if polka bands decided to be cool but forgot the accordion! I mean that as a compliment. There’s a bounce to it. If new music is really coming I am genuinely excited, and I say that as someone whose heart still lives in the accordion. The mysteriousness of it all is fun honestly, why not enjoy the anticipation?
lol Brenda welcome, the accordion thing is actually not wrong tho.
The polka comparison is not wrong. There is a pulse in Is This It that is very direct. Not complicated. That is not an insult.
The anticipation around a Strokes tease is interesting to me from the outside. In chimurenga, Thomas Mapfumo would go years between records and the community held the music alive in the meantime, playing it at gatherings, passing it through generations. The question with The Strokes has always been whether the fanbase does that same kind of carrying work, keeping Is This It alive as a living thing, or whether they’re just waiting for the artist to do it for them. Genuine question, not a dig. Some music earns that custodianship and some doesn’t.
I must confess that The Strokes remain for me something of a mystery. I have listened carefully to Is This It and I understand why people find it important, but in my experience with Shostakovich and Prokofiev, the tension in a composition comes from where the music goes, not from where it stays. The Strokes seem to win by staying. This is perhaps a cultural gap in my listening. But I am genuinely curious what the new music will show us, whether they move or whether staying is, again, the point.
You want to talk about bands teasing new music and making people remember why they exist? Eddie Cochran did it before he ever had the chance to come back, and that’s the tragedy. But what The Strokes have that most of those early rock and roll cats didn’t is time, the luxury of a second and third chapter. Buddy Holly never got one. The Strokes are sitting on something those guys never had, so yeah, I get a little impatient when the tease drags on too long. Use the time, fellas.