The Strokes made a return to the limelight late last year and this year with the release of their fourth studio album, Angles. The band made a ton of noise in the early part of last decade with a pair of classic albums, Is This It and Room On Fire, followed by a fairly poorly received third album, First Impressions Of Earth, in 2006. The band has been on hiatus ever since then and has decided to come back and have released a brand new album to go along with some new festival appearances and such. While there are a few moments on this album that work, and the band finds a few good grooves to get into, for the most part this album just doesn’t feel fresh or interesting the way they did 10 years ago with the first two albums, and the band doesn’t seem to have really had much success in updating their sound and re-distinguishing themselves in the current music scene with this album. A few nice moments, but the album as a whole doesn’t really seem to have too much energy or personality, and comes off a little uninspiring and faded.

The band seems to really try to update their sound a little bit on this record by trying to toy around a little bit more with a few studio gimmicks and trying to integrate some electronic elements into their sound, but while they come off just fine on the album, nothing about it really sounds too fresh or interesting. When The Strokes came to prominence in the early 2000s they were really bringing something different than what the rest of music had going on at the time, but in today’s world where there are so many bands that mine this same territory and bands are making bigger and bigger strides to distinguish themselves, it doesn’t really feel like The Strokes have been able to update and adapt to this new environment on this new record. The songs are perfectly fine, and are catchy and have some good solid hooks in them. Nothing really is that memorable from the album though and this record feels more like an effort to stay within the lines than an effort to break through them and really try to make it something new.

Now, the band has had a lot of success with their sound and the way they do things, so there isn’t necessarily anything wrong with kind of going down some familiar roads with this album, and like I have said, it isn’t a bad album. But because the band really hasn’t done too much exploration here, the album, while solid technically, just isn’t quite as interesting and intriguing as I wanted it to be. It doesn’t really grab your attention to a great extent. This is a perfectly fine album from the band, I just don’t know that it is the resounding comeback album that everyone wanted.