Worse, their new ideas are awful: tricksy prog riffing on Metabolism, 80s pop reggae on Machu Picchu, the latter clearly destined to be welcomed by anyone who thinks rock music reached its peak with Nik Kershaw’s I Won’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me. You wonder why anyone would include something like the scrawny two-note trudge of You’re So Right on an album, unless it’s as a favour to Radiohead: anyone who thinks their experimentation is sterile and grooveless might care to listen and see how sterile and grooveless a musical experiment can get. Gratisfaction is an attempt to channel Thin Lizzy, conducted, alas, on a day when the leather-trousered ghost of Phil Lynott clearly wasn’t picking up.

Plenty of great records have been made in an atmosphere of terrible acrimony. But Angles just sounds like an album made by people who really didn’t want to make an album. Nowadays, in contrast to their early years, they make being in a band seem like unwanted extra homework. Furthermore, they appear to have knocked said homework off on the bus on the way into school. It’s not so much Is This It as Will This Do? It won’t.

Fra The Guardian’s anmeldelse af The Strokes nye Angles. Har selv hørt albummet og jo, det er virkelig en ret frastødende affære. Kan indhold her om muligt være grimmere end dets Palads Biograf-farvede cover? Ja, det kan det.