Julian Casablancas: “‘Last Nite’ by The Strokes is “pretty dead to me”

The Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas has said that the band’s classic hit single ‘Last Nite’ is “pretty dead to me”.

• READ MORE: Julian Casablancas sets the world to rights: “We always think we’re so special and beyond the old ways, but we’re not”

Casablancas has often expressed his dismay at performing the band’s more popular, older songs in the past, admitting that he became “sick” of playing old hits live, saying “the music doesn’t move you” when playing the same tracks repeatedly in 2020.

He added at the time: “When you’re growing up and imagining playing music, it is for the excitement, but the one aspect of doing it for a living that is a sadness you don’t anticipate is that you play songs so much, you become sick of them.

“We hadn’t played for a while. So it was still fun, but when you start playing 30 or 40 shows, the music doesn’t move you. You feel phoney. To some extent, that’s why I play with [side project] The Voidz. I couldn’t care less about playing ‘Last Nite.’”

Now he has reiterated his disdain for ‘Last Nite’ again in a new interview with The Guardian.

When asked what song he can no longer listen to, Casablancas replied: “‘Last Nite’ by The Strokes is pretty dead to me. I’m not sure why.

“There are some others like ‘Reptilia’, ‘Hard To Explain’, ‘Someday’, ‘Take It Or Leave It’, ‘New York City Cops’ that are comparable in terms of crowd reaction that I’m not quite as sick of. If I heard it on the radio, I’d probably turn it off.”

Last month he also opened up about why he’s “kind of stepped away a little bit” from The Strokes.

Their last album was 2020’s ‘The New Abnormal‘; since then, Casablancas has just released a new album with his experimental side project The Voidz, which dropped back in September.

Speaking to the LA Times, he was asked whether there was anything he missed about working with the Strokes or the Voidz, to which he replied: “Probably one direction more than the other. I don’t know if I can answer that without being offensive to someone.”

When the LA Times presumed “that means you miss the Voidz”, Casablancas confirmed: “Sometimes, yeah”.

Casablancas was then asked whether he felt like he was contributing to an “opiate-of-the-masses vibe” when playing with The Strokes. In response, Casablancas said: “No, because I think I put political thoughts now in Strokes songs too.

“I always have to some degree. I definitely think a lot of Strokes fans don’t get that about it so much, which is maybe why I’ve kind of stepped away a little bit. But it’s a very cool day job that I’m honoured to have, so I don’t feel negatively about it. If it was wasting so much of my time that I couldn’t do anything positive, then I would. But I don’t let it get to that point. At least I don’t think so. I could be lying to myself.”

Speaking to NME in September, Casablancas also elaborated on the political nature of his earlier Strokes songs. “In ‘New York City Cops’ and ‘Soma’ there were political themes,” he told us. “‘Political’ is a bad word because you think of the Tories and the Republicans – that’s not really what I mean. I’m talking about the ideas and values of human beings and how to philosophically combat the gears of power and the people who control things.”

Casablancas went on to say that those ideas were “always at the core of the musical quest” to the extent that he feels he did “maybe care more about that than the music”.

In the same interview, Casablancas spoke out on the upcoming presidential election tomorrow (November 5), saying the candidates were “both two sides of the same corporate coin”.