Hard to Explain
Julian Casablancas, Nick Valensi, and Fabrizio Moretti started jamming together as teenagers at Manhattan’s Dwight School in 1997. Casablancas brought in childhood friend Nikolai Fraiture from the Lycée Français de New York, and Albert Hammond Jr. joined after reconnecting with Casablancas from their time together at a Swiss boarding school. “Hard to Explain” came out June 25, 2001, the lead single from their debut album Is This It. It turns 25 today.
Producer Gordon Raphael recorded the song in March and April 2001 at Transporterraum, a small studio in lower Manhattan. Casablancas wrote it alone first, sketching the melody on a drum machine before bringing it to the band. Rough Trade and RCA released it backed with the future album outtake “New York City Cops” as the B-side. The single hit No. 1 on the UK Indie Chart and No. 16 on the UK Singles Chart.
“Genuine scalp-crackling excitement, a comet-rare synthesis of form, content, attitude and hair.”
The song never cracked the Billboard Hot 100, and it barely registered on radio. None of that mattered. Roman Coppola directed the music video, a stock-footage collage stitched together with Space Shuttle launch footage and clips lifted from Koyaanisqatsi.
NME ranked “Hard to Explain” at No. 3 on its list of the 100 best tracks of the 2000s, crediting it with kickstarting the entire garage rock revival. Rolling Stone placed it at No. 59 on its own list of the 100 Best Songs of the 2000s. Two decades later, The Independent and Paste both still ranked it among the two best songs The Strokes ever wrote, Paste naming it the single best song in the band’s catalog.
Is This It followed two months later in the UK, then landed in the US that October, delayed and reshuffled after September 11. The American version dropped “New York City Cops” from the tracklist entirely. “Hard to Explain” survived all of it untouched. Twenty-five years on, it still sounds like the moment guitar music remembered how to be exciting.