New Music Expressed: The Strokes Return, Beautiful and Disinterested

I wanted to start a semi-regular 'strand' on here about the latest new things I've listened to/been subjected to/half-heard out of the car window or whatever. Then I realised that what with everything else going on, I couldn't really clearly remember hearing a new record that actually registered with me at all. That's pretty sad, in my book.

Let's think now. Oh hang fire, here's 2001's hottest new band, back from another trip around Blondie's back catalogue in a specially adapted DeLorean (via a whistlestop tour of Retro Vintage in Soho) to bring us more brand new songs from 1979! Hurrah, then, for the mighty and misunderstood Strokes.

But what's that nestled under Julian's nylon piping-clad arm? It's One-Way Trigger, their new single, of course, which sounds quite a bit like a battery of OCD-afflicted robots playing a neurotically precise cover of A-Ha classic 'Take On Me'. And you know what? It's just like all the other Strokes singles post-Is This It? - annoying and contrived for the first four listens, then sleek and familliar on the fifth, and then finally completely impossible to ignore. Eventually of course, the essential 'style-over-substance' issue that plagues all Strokes records will raise its tousled head again - seriously, they've never written a song about anything, have they? - but until then, it's a brilliantly honed radio single, and one only they could have made.  The poster for it is also fucking awesome: