Description

LP Vinyl – 19439-70588-1

The New Abnormal,” the band’s sixth album and its first since 2013. The title is eerily prescient—a handy summation of how daily life in New York has changed since the start of the year. This is a lonesome and frightening time, and nostalgia is a heavy and intoxicating force. “The New Abnormal” sounds better to me than almost anything else I’ve listened to this spring. The album was produced by Rick Rubin, whose method consists mostly of stripping songs of extraneous or maudlin elements, compressing the audio, and pumping up the volume. Rubin can turn an ordinary song into a bullet. His practice of reduction and amplification doesn’t work for every artist, but this distillation has made the Strokes sound only sharper and more potent.