James’ Shamelessly Nostalgic A-Z Of Albums That He Liked To Listen To When He Was Younger – Part 9: Is This It

It is time for ‘I’ in the 2021 A-Z Challenge.

The letter ‘I’ often tends to lead to an intro full of pronoun fun when I do an A-Z Challenge. But I will not do that today. And neither will ‘I’.

I is for Is This It

The debut release from The Strokes was the other album, alongside Elephant by The White Stripes, that I listened to on all my commutes during the brief period of my life when my only method of consuming music ‘on the go’ was a mini-disc player. And much as enjoyed Elephant, it was The Strokes that spent more time on repeat than The White Stripes.

I loved Is This It. I still love Is This It. It’s such a good album that I can even forgive the woeful lack of punctuation in the album title. The Strokes have released some pretty decent albums over the years, and even if they suffered with a little bit of ‘difficult second album’ syndrome for their follow-up effort Room on Fire, their sophomore record is still better than a lot of bands could ever hope to produce. So it would be unfair to say Is This It is the only album by The Strokes that you need to listen to.

But to be fair, I did, for a time in the early noughties, regard it as the only album by any band that I needed to listen to.

Any of the singles would be an excellent choice to play us out today, but I think I’m morally obliged to go with Last Nite.