Is This It

The Strokes originally started recording this album with Gil Norton, the same producer who made Doolittle with the Pixies. They scrapped all of it because it sounded too polished. They then found Gordon Raphael, a low-key New York producer they had met at one of their own shows, and spent six weeks in his basement studio in Manhattan recording the whole thing fast and loose on purpose. An executive at their label RCA heard an early cut and told Raphael he was ruining Julian Casablancas's voice and destroying the band's career. That executive was wrong about almost everything.

Is This It came out in July 2001 and immediately ignited a firestorm in the British music press, then crossed back to America and kicked off the garage rock revival of the early 2000s. The album sounds like New York at two in the morning, guitar lines falling through the spaces in Casablancas's flat, sardonic vocals, the whole thing moving at a pace that feels urgent without ever breaking into a sprint. The production is deliberately thin, the bass turned up and the guitars run through cheap equipment, every drum hit sounding like it was recorded in a bathroom because several of them were. That lo-fi scrape is not a flaw, it is the point.

On your first listen, the album will be over before you feel ready for it to end. At thirty-five minutes it is one of the shortest entries on this list, and that brevity is part of its genius. "Last Nite," "Someday," "Barely Legal," "Hard to Explain" arrive and disappear before they have time to wear out their welcome, and then you immediately want to hear them again. This is what a perfect debut sounds like.