When The New Abnormal was released in 2020, it felt less like a return and more like a quiet confrontation.
Not a confrontation with critics.
Not a confrontation with trends.
But a confrontation with reality—personal, cultural, and psychological.
After years of fragmented releases, shifting relevance, and long silences, The Strokes didn’t come back trying to sound young again. Instead, they sounded aware. Aware of time passing. Aware of disillusionment. Aware that adulthood doesn’t arrive with clarity—only with better questions.
The New Abnormal isn’t a protest album or a nostalgia trip. It’s a document of what it feels like to live after the illusions wear off. And that’s exactly why it continues to resonate.
When the Script Breaks
The album opens with The Adults Are Talking, a title that feels almost ironic. The groove is smooth, relaxed, almost reassuring—but the lyrics tell a different story. Conversations loop endlessly. Authority figures speak, but nothing changes. Everyone sounds confident, yet no one seems to know what they’re doing.
It captures a moment many people hit in their twenties or thirties: the realization that “adults” don’t suddenly become wise arbiters of truth. They’re just older people repeating systems they inherited. The shock isn’t that things are broken—it’s that they always were.
That realization can feel destabilizing.
It can also feel liberating.
Immediately after, Selfless deepens that emotional register. It’s one of the album’s most restrained tracks—gentle, aching, almost apologetic. Rather than dramatizing heartbreak, it sits inside quiet longing. The kind that comes from wanting deeply but refusing to demand.
This isn’t youthful desperation.
It’s mature vulnerability.
Nostalgia Without Comfort
One of the album’s most striking qualities is how it treats the past. The New Abnormal looks backward often, but never sentimentally.
Brooklyn Bridge to Chorus feels like a warped memory. Synths pulse like fluorescent lights. The rhythm is upbeat, but something feels off—like a party you stayed at too long. The song recalls youth, nightlife, and movement, but stripped of romantic certainty.
This isn’t longing for what was—it’s recognizing that what was couldn’t last.
That tension carries into Bad Decisions, a track that wears its influences openly while refusing to apologize for them. The chorus feels massive, almost defiant, yet the message underneath is self-aware: we keep repeating patterns we already know don’t work.
Growth, the album suggests, isn’t about becoming flawless.
It’s about recognizing the loop while you’re still inside it.
The Illusion of Endless Summer
Few songs on the album capture modern unease as effectively as Eternal Summer. On the surface, it feels smooth, almost sun-drenched. But listen closely and it becomes unsettling. Voices distort. Lyrics hint at denial, excess, and collapse.
The song mirrors a broader cultural anxiety—the sense that comfort has been extended beyond its limits. That we’re living in a prolonged “summer” that can’t last, but no one wants to be the first to say it out loud.
Emotionally, this maps onto personal life too: staying comfortable, staying distracted, staying busy—anything to avoid confronting the deeper unease beneath the surface.*
The New Abnormal doesn’t shame this instinct.
It simply names it.
* If this resonated with you, check out our eBook on anxiety
Standing at the Threshold
At the Door is one of the album’s most important moments. Sparse, patient, and nearly motionless, it feels like suspended breath. There’s no release, no crescendo—just waiting.
Psychologically, this song captures a state many people live in without realizing it: knowing change is necessary, but feeling unable to initiate it. Standing in front of a door you’ve been avoiding—not because what’s behind it is unknown, but because you already sense it will require something from you.
That stillness contrasts sharply with Why Are Sundays So Depressing, which masks existential dread with upbeat momentum. It captures the emotional crash that follows routine—the moment when distraction fades and you’re left alone with yourself.
Becoming Someone New (And Mourning Who You Were)
One of the album’s most emotionally honest tracks is Not the Same Anymore. There’s no triumph here. No grand declaration of reinvention. Just acceptance.
Change doesn’t always feel like progress.
Sometimes it feels like loss.
That theme continues in Chances, a quieter reflection on near-misses and roads not taken. It treats regret with realism rather than drama. Life isn’t a single defining moment—it’s an accumulation of small choices, many of which only make sense in hindsight.
Maturity, the album suggests, isn’t mastery.
It’s integration.
Disillusionment Without Cynicism
What makes The New Abnormal endure is that it never collapses into bitterness.
You’re So Right confronts ego and stubbornness head-on—how being “right” can matter more than being connected. The confrontation cuts both ways, outward and inward.
Meanwhile, Metabolism channels anxiety into jittery momentum. It feels overstimulated and undernourished at the same time—like modern life compressed into sound.
These songs don’t offer solutions.
They offer recognition.
An Ending That Doesn’t Pretend to Be One
The album closes with Ode to the Mets, a long, reflective reckoning. It sounds like standing still after years of motion.
There’s disappointment here—but also clarity. The acceptance that not everything resolves cleanly. That waiting forever for things to return to how they were can keep you stuck longer than letting go.
It doesn’t sound defeated.
It sounds awake.
Why The New Abnormal Endures
Years later, The New Abnormal still feels uncannily accurate—not because it predicted anything, but because it documented a psychological state that hasn’t gone away.
It speaks to:
- The collapse of certainty without the collapse of responsibility
- The fatigue of endless stimulation
- The quiet grief of unmet expectations
- The humility that comes with self-awareness
- The strange peace that follows acceptance
Like Lonerism (read more)did for an earlier moment, this album captures a transitional space—the gap between who you thought you’d be and who you’re becoming.
Medal Mind Perspective
The New Abnormal doesn’t ask you to fix yourself.
It doesn’t demand optimism.
It doesn’t sell transformation.
It offers something rarer: permission to admit that things feel off—and that you’re not weak for noticing.
Sometimes growth doesn’t arrive as clarity.
Sometimes it arrives as honesty.
And sometimes, that’s enough to begin again.
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