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Is This It

Certain Songs #2526: The Strokes – “Hard to Explain”

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Album: Is This It
Year: 2001

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On the song that was the first single released from This Is It, producer Gordon Raphael compressed drummer Fabrizo Morettis drums so much that they sounded like a drum machine, which I guess begs the question why not use a real drum machine? But of course, the answer is in the question, and even if Moretti’s snare is almost fully lost, there is so much forward momentum in “Hard to Explain,” it almost doesn’t matter.

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Certain Songs #2525: The Strokes – “Last Nite”

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Album: Is This It
Year: 2001

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The biggest song on Is This It combined two flavors you wouldn’t think would taste great together and made a cool punk-adjacent hybrid out of them.

The first element was the jangly guitar rock of Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, whose initial signature hit, “American Girl” was lifted pretty much wholesale for the opening, the guitars of Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr bouncing against each other as the song builds into its verses, at which point bassist Nikolai Fraiture and drummer Fabrizio Moretti go all Motown on us, just as Julian Casablancas sings the first verse.

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