#3797 The Stokes - The New Abnormal

3/5 with every passing year Is This It becomes better and its goodness becomes harder to understand. Years where a new Strokes album comes out doubly so. One thing science has settled on is that that album was very _cool, as in detached and effortless, and somehow perfect. The New Abnormal is not that. The band sounds tense and subtly sloppy, and Casablancas sounds like he's having trouble keeping up, tiny gasps and surges to push the words where they need to be, and no number of studio snippets and winking asides can cover for it. Even putting Basquiat on the cover broadcasts a doomed plan for engaging in looseness