The Strokes: Heart In A Cage

Swiss finishing school eductions! Supermodels on speed-dial! Enough NME Awards to start a bric-a-brac stall! No wonder The Strokes look so pissed off all the time. And what a right old bummer it must be knowing that you can ignore the two best tracks on your new album (‘Razorblade’ anybody? Wherefore art thou ‘You Only Live Once’?) and still melt the heart of the charts. This is an absolute belter of a tune, reminiscent of the creative goldmine of ‘Is This It’. Just so we know that knocking out this stuff isn’t easy, Julian drawls: “Well I don’t feel better/When I’m fucking around/And I don’t write better/When I’m stuck in the ground”. A great tune, some rotten lyrics, and a sense that their mid-career wobble may well be behind them. What more can we ask for?