THE STROKES: Hard to Explain

Julian, a notoriously hard partier, recently gave up drinking for the good of the band. “I’ve always said I wouldn’t let drinking affect how I work,” he told Spin Magazine. “And then it did. So I had to stop.” He is newly married, to the band’s assistant manager, Juliet Joslin. Julian is fluent in Danish, Spanish and French. According to the fan site Strokesfan.com, his favorite sexual position is “missionary.”

Now 27, his singing voice is essentially still that of an adolescent: sullen, joyful, petulant, regretful, emotional and immediate, a voice that says it will always be younger than you, and more free. It’s a beautiful instrument that in the past he has tried hard to obscure and uglify, with vocal filters and countless cigarettes. (On the first two albums, he often sounds like he’s singing through an intercom.)

His early lyrics paint oblique pictures by use of artful contradictions. It’s in his sense of humor and speaking style as well: naming the band’s debut album Is This It, singing “I wanna be forgotten” in the first line of the band’s second album and naming the song with the chorus “I’ve got nothing to say” (“Ask Me Anything”).

Julian’s lyrics are typically conflicted about everything, about you, the girl he’s seeing, himself. While they can seem underwhelming on paper, they become incredibly visceral when felt through the music. He prefers the gray area, the emotionally vague, to songs that say everything is going to be alright or everything is impossibly fucked.

“I think it’s more interesting if you have to figure it out, if it’s not right on the surface,” he says. “You try to find that middle ground.”

He is a worrier. “The only way I’d feel secure is if we’d fooled people and it sucked, and people said, ‘Oh yeah, the Strokes are great,’” he has said before.

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The secret to The Strokes, success is not, in the end, hype. The real reason they’ve come as far as they have is that everything they’ve ever done has been informed by a fear of sucking.

“The only thing that made us good now is that I realized my whole life I sucked,” Casablancas told The Face in 2002. “Always. Everything I did, it sucked. That was the motto of everything: I suck, I gotta do better, I gotta work harder. That’s the motto of music.”