Julian Casablancas is looking. Since his final album with the Voidz, 2018’s Advantage, the Strokes frontman has been occupied with the deepest questions of our time: the bounds of political philosophy, the ethics of synthetic intelligence, and what college his two younger sons ought to attend. In late 2020, the singer partnered with Rolling Stone for an interview collection referred to as S.O.S. — Earth Is a Mess, the place he quizzed journalists, philosophers, and former presidential candidate Andrew Yang about democracy and freedom. Regardless of his makes an attempt to earnestly have interaction his topics on comparative economics and the psychology of Trump voters, the encircling surroundings and visible results—public mental Noam Chomsky beamed in as a headless, a low-resolution coloration map, for instance, with Casablancas washed in fuchsia and forest inexperienced—make the collection almost not possible to take significantly. On Like All Earlier than You, his third album with the Voidz, Casablancas depicts his quest for a guru by way of the mediated sounds of chintzy synthesizers and vocoder vocals—the issue is, it appears even he can’t resolve if he’s joking.
The music of the Voidz exists on a post-apocalyptic, retro-futuristic dance flooring. On Advantage, this got here within the type of what Casablancas referred to as “jail jazz,” which largely translated to a persecution complicated shouted over clipped guitar riffs and obnoxiously syncopated synths. On Like All Earlier than You, Casablancas has moved previous martyrdom (although not previous self-aggrandizement, waxing nostalgic about his “lounge lizard” days on the Metallica-cover-band-esque “Prophecy of the Dragon”) and onto extra metaphysical issues. He desires to discover a chief to divulge to him some common fact, although he can’t actually resolve who or what that’s. On “Squarewave,” he seems to be to the transcendental meditation founder Maharishi Mahesh Yogi; on “Prophecy,” the Buddhist textual content Lotus Sutra would possibly present the skeleton key; by “Spectral Evaluation,” he’s wooed by the doomed Heaven’s Gate cult.
The transient references to and even faster retreats from these heady ideas put on skinny by midway by way of the album’s tracklist, and that’s earlier than he begins talking in Latin on “When Will the Time of These Bastards Finish.” It’s arduous to understand how critical Casablancas’ political musings are—his lyrics about First Modification rights and stolen votes—when these remarks observe a line like “I’m gonna blast her with my Stratocaster.” There are moments the place his sheepish humor shines, like when he’s imagining the push of recognizing a good friend in a firing squad on “Flexorcist.” However taken as a complete, it appears like religious whiplash.
