The Strokes: from left, Nikolai Fraiture, Julian Casablancas, Nick Valensi, Albert Hammond Jr., and Fab Moretti.   (Photo: Roger Deckker)

As the first album gained momentum and world tours followed, the Strokes presented themselves as an enviable social unit, real friends just out of their teens, living the dream of adulthood postponed. Like the seventies bands they took their cues from, their musical skills were unpolished; they were really just mastering their instruments, together, in public, and that was no small part of the appeal. Though Julian had an uneasy relationship with the limelight—you can see evidence of it in photos, where he is often shuffled off to the side or the back, not preening in front—the band was utterly reliant on him, artistically and emotionally. Gifted and driven, he also displayed a strong penchant for willfully destructive behavior. Periodically, this would burst out into the open, but you had a feeling that the band was dealing with his black moods and impetuousness on a more regular basis. Almost from the very start, the Strokes gave their fans plenty of reasons to wonder if they were in it for the long haul, or if, at any moment, Julian might yank the cord and bring the whole band crashing down around him.

Two weeks earlier, at Wiz Kid Management, the Strokes’ East Village headquarters, “Sugar, We’re Going Down” is playing on the big TV screen—that ridiculous Fall Out Boy video where the guy grows antlers. It’s the night before they head off on the first leg of their world tour.

“When did music get so bad?” asks the normally upbeat Moretti, sprawled on a couch with his bandmates between photo shoots.

A willowy brunette named Juliet appears, holding a clipboard, announcing an 8 a.m. pickup time to JFK. Only later will I learn that this is Julian Casablancas’s wife.

“Simple Plan is the worst band,” says Hammond, as the next video rolls. He holds his hand over the mouthpiece of his cell phone: “I’d rather put shit in my mouth than listen to them.” Then he returns to his phone conversation: “Hey, Mom, I love you, see you later.”

Casablancas glowers at the screen with his jaded baby face. When asked who was the last great band, he frowns and says nothing. Just when it seems he’s forgotten the question or decided to ignore it, he says, “Nirvana.”

Of the five, Nikolai Fraiture is the least talkative, and it’s often hard to figure out what he thinks. He still hits the clubs in New York, as aggressively as ever, to hear new music, identifying an Australian band called You Am I as one of his new favorites, as well as the Arcade Fire, with whom they shared a bill on their recent Brazilian tour. It was Nikolai who was responsible for the let-there-be-light moment in the creation myth of the Strokes, when, circa age 13, he arrived at his friend and Lycée Française classmate Julian Casablancas’s Upper East Side apartment with a Velvet Underground record his older brother had given him.

“I don’t listen to much music,” Casablancas tells me later. “Most of the time I stick with the important artists, and I don’t want to waste my time with anything less.” Among the chosen few: Bob Marley, the Doors, and naturally, the Velvet Underground.

The next day over a pizza at Mezzogiorno in Soho, Nick Valensi, the youngest, tallest, and most relentlessly sincere member of the band, says, “I’m happy to listen to anything. I like music. Nowadays I like Queens of the Stone Age and System of a Down. I’m of the opinion that now is a great time for music. I really respect Norah Jones for what she does—God, I’m such a fag.” He rolls his eyes as if anticipating his bandmates’ reactions to this kind of talk. “I even like My Chemical Romance.” Looking very Carnaby Street mod in a tight velvet coat and a long silk scarf, he ventures a theory: “The reason people liked the first record, maybe, was because it was kind of New Wave, kind of retro, and no one was doing that music then—the Ramones, Talking Heads, Blondie, the Cars. That music never went out of style, but no one was playing it. We were filling some kind of void in music.”

Since Is This It, of course, bands like the Hives (the Swedish Strokes), the Vines (the Australian Strokes), the Killers (the Mormon Strokes), and a dozen more have made the neo–New Wave sound almost ubiquitous. In 2003, the Strokes themselves released Room on Fire—which Rolling Stone called the most eagerly anticipated follow-up since Nirvana’s In Utero. Though not quite a dud, Room on Fire failed to live up to the band’s mystique. To devoted fans, it sounded like a slightly lesser version of Is This It, which is to say good but not great. Detractors, meanwhile, seized on it as evidence of the Strokes’ inherently limited musical vision.