Long Player: Great pop music, with strokes of genius

In the age of the digital download, Jeff Harford rediscovers the album ...

Before most of us had heard The Strokes, we'd heard about them. A hyperbolic pre-emptive media strike promising rock 'n' roll's salvation. A knee-jerk retaliation slamming privileged white boys playing at being street-savvy New York rockers. A daft article or two discussing the saucy cover of debut album Is This It. It was enough to put any potential fan on guard.

When it landed in this part of the world in mid-2001, Is This It had to not only climb this mountain of public expectation, it had to establish a foothold ahead of its US release.

As it happened, the task at home became even more challenging in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, which resulted in a delay and an 11th-hour decision to drop the track New York City Cops.

The album did better in the UK, European and Australian charts than in the US, but it served as a clarion call to garage bands worldwide, whose efforts were being swamped by a wave of bombastic nu-metal acts. Not so much a manifesto for change as a reminder of core values, it won its audience over by being that most honourable of things: a great pop record.

Clean lines and dirty vocals give the album its signature sound, gathering together punk and post-punk influences from both sides of the Atlantic and retooling them into a guitar-band template for the noughties.

Urgency and discipline come together on a dud-free collection of songs that snap with the electricity of a band that has found its mojo, based on nothing more complicated than a driving beat and a snappy hook.

Songs such as Last Nite, Someday and Hard To Explain paved the way for other garage rockers such as The Libertines, Franz Ferdinand, Arctic Monkeys and The Hives to broaden their audiences, rejuvenating the music industry's interest in bands with an equal mix of melody and madness in their veins.